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Coursera: Why Methods and Statistics are More Important Than Ever
This guest post was written by Annemarie Zand Scholten, lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, introducing the new Specialization “Methods and Statistics in Social Science”. Knowing something about methods and statistics is more and more important in a world that’s becoming increasingly data-driven. From evidence-based medicine to evidence-based business strategy, in nonprofit, government, and business alike, basing decisions on empirical evidence is rapidly becoming the norm. Making sound evidence-based decisions requires that you know what you’re doing. You need to know what questions to ask, what data to collect, how to collect them and, perhaps most importantly, how to interpret the answers they present. To what extent can you draw inferences from the data? How likely are you to draw the right conclusions? You can collect all the data in the world and run the most complicated analyses, but if you ask the wrong questions of your data or misinterpret…