Research

How results are made, and how to read them. The series here are about method rather than any one field: what a number from an experiment can and cannot tell you, what the words in a methods section mean, and the design choices that decide whether anyone should believe a finding. The worked examples are deliberately everyday ones, a teacher, a revision guide and an exam, so that nothing here needs a technical background.

Research Basics

A plain-language series on the words in a methods section: hypotheses and the null, the permutation test done by shuffling cards, what a p-value means, confidence intervals built by resampling, the Holm correction, how to defend a null result, blinding and preregistration, then the bootstrap test, the classical tests, regression and mixed models, how to read a league table, and the Bayesian alternative. 15 parts, each following one made-up study of whether a revision guide raises exam marks, with a demo you can shuffle, resample or break, and Python that reproduces its numbers, plus a glossary.

Research

Research Basics