In the previous posting, we made an attempt to understand what statistics is all about. Thanks for the compliments from all readers especially about the article ‘statistics aren’t just figures’, may God bless you to read even more!

Let’s make an attempt to define statistics without reservations. Statistics is all encompassing and therefore, it would be egotistical to restrict its definition to only quantitative aspects. In the beginning when the author of this article was growing up as a young statistician in a remote village, his teachers in primary school by then sarcastically didn’t know the existence of statistics. They simply knew mathematics, and other subjects like science and social studies! Someone has just told me here that even up to now, mention of statistics begins somewhere after primary education level. Corollary, the beginning of statistics in Uganda comes after a child is a teenager. Possibly, the curriculum developers think this is the right age for the child to appreciate the otherwise all inclusive subject of statistics.

Harris and Taylor (2009) in a forward of their book Medical Statistics Made Easy wrote “A love of statistics is, oddly, not what attracts most young people to a career in medicine and I suspect that many clinicians, like me, have at best a sketchy and incomplete understanding of this difficult subject.”

According to the American Statistical Association, Statistics is the scientific application of mathematical principles to the collection, analysis, and presentation of numerical data. Statisticians apply their knowledge of statistical methods to a variety of subject areas, such as biology, economics, engineering, medicine, public health, psychology, marketing, education, and sports.

A more open definition of statistics is given by the department of statistics of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln whose motto is turning data into knowledge to solve real world problems. They define statistics as the development and application of methods to collect, analyze and interpret data. Modern statistical methods involve the design and analysis of experiments and surveys, the quantification of biological, social and scientific phenomenon and the application of statistical principles to understand more about the world around us.

An interesting definition is that statistics is the study of data. This implies that a study involving either quantitative or qualitative data is basically statistics.

Many issues arise from these definitions, but I will just conclude without delving into the discussion by pointing out few generic questions. Does statistics imply strictly quantitative data? Hence, is statistics restricted to the study involving strictly numeric data? Is quantification of qualitative data a function of a statistics? Thus, is qualitative study independent of statistics?