A statistical approach, methodology, inspired by John Tukey. Tukey was something of a polymath and I recommend the Wikipedia article about him not least for the glorious first hand description of one of his lectures! I think I am pretty much a follower of the EDA tradition these days but perhaps compromised a bit from his pure form of EDA by the pressures to publish in journals that continue to expect inferential statistics and “confirmatory” analyses.
Details #
EDA overlaps with descriptive statistics and into the realm of statistical estimation, i.e. confidence intervals but it is apt that Tukey’s term was “Data Analysis” not “statistics”. I can’t do better than quote from the Wikipedia article about EDA:
The objectives of EDA are to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis#Development
- Enable unexpected discoveries in the data
- Suggest hypotheses about the causes of observed phenomena
- Assess assumptions on which statistical inference will be based
- Support the selection of appropriate statistical tools and techniques
- Provide a basis for further data collection through surveys or experiments
Those strike me as exactly the objectives we should have for most of our quantitative research in the fields of MH, W-B and therapies, we shouldn’t be just trying to come up with pseudo-certainties from systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials.
Try also #
Confidence intervals
Descriptive statistics
Estimation
Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) paradigm
Chapters #
This approach runs through the entire OMbook but we didn’t mention it explicitly partly to avoid getting into culture wars!
Online resources #
Not yet.
Dates #
First created 29.iv.24.
