Statistics is asking questions about data and trying your best to answer those questions. If you treat every dataset the same, sans context, you just make calculations that don’t mean a whole lot. Maybe there’s an upwards or downwards trend. Maybe two variables correlate.
But what does that mean outside the quantitative definition? How does it apply to those reading the results of an analysis? If you can’t answer these questions, then you don’t know enough about the data, where it came from, why it exists, and what it represents.
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