Readin’, ‘Ritin’, and Statistics

Statistics has, for a number of years, been the principle mathematical tool used by scholars in a number of disciplines (e. g., economics, psychology and medicine). For example, a survey of a leading political science journal (see p. xiv of [3]) found that 65 percent of all the articles published between 1968 and 1970 used numerical data. This had grown from 12 percent in the period 1946–48. The uses (and abuses) of statistics are so pervasive that at least one course in statistics is now required by most of the undergraduate programs in the social sciences.