Research is a growing field in this era of information. Vary, many disciplines have come up and even the well-established fields are still growing. There is a lot of information that waits to be discovered by scholars and scientists. This information is used to inform others through increased knowledge. Moreover, research information creates gateways for more research in the same area or other areas where such thought-provoking information is necessary. Research therefore requires tools such as Minitab which help organize, process and interpret data in various ways.
Variables in research are the factors that hold possible implications on the outcome of the research. Minitab is a combination of tools used in helping the researcher to somehow regulate or control certain variables. In research, variability refers to the spread of data across a given research, consisting of variance, range, mean, and standard deviation. Variables are inevitable. Research might be tampered with incase extraneous variables come in; researchers need not be too stiff in regulating variables in order to give room for a realistic type of outcome in a natural occurrence. Higher variability has been linked to a lower ability in detecting statistical significance (Ben-Zvi & Garfield, 2004).
An example that embodies a research marked with high variability is a researcher picks two groups A, B, and C to perform a study whose results are hinged on personality as a variable. However the researcher picks sample 1 from a group of college cheerleaders (which is likely to be made up of mostly extroverts) e.g. 45 extroverts and 5 introverts this would bring about a high variability.
For group B, which becomes the second sample the researcher acquires a sample from the swim team, here the chances of getting both extroverts and introverts in equal proportion is much higher and thus this would give a low variability making it easier to distinguish certain variables.
The third scenario is where group C which becomes sample 3 is picked from a bar, the chances of getting a number of introverts that is not so far off from each other is high. For example one might get 30 extroverts and 20 introverts or the other way around. This type of variability is medium where one can still acquire a distinction in statistical results.
References
Ben-Zvi, D., & Garfield, J. B. (2004). Research on Reasoning About Variability. Statistics Education Research Journal, 3(2), 4–6. Retrieved from http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/serj/SERJ3(2)_forward.pdf
