IMPORTANCE OF STATISTICS IN SOCIAL WORK

According to the definition of statistics, it is the science of collecting, analyzing,

summarizing, and making inferences from data sets. Since conducting research means
you must make sense of all the data compiled, statistics are enormously important for
drawing accurate conclusions about the topic being examined in the research.
For professionals in social work, the understanding of mathematical principles is crucial.
It is important in your own profession to consider investigations and reach evidence-
based decisions but that is just the start. You will decide the right interventions for your
clients if you consider the statistics. New software can be used to track and assess the
client or team's success. Statistics are not only mathematics for social workers, but they
are also a vital method in practice.
This concise and informative statistical introduction limits its attention to the most social
workers' terms. Social Work statistics instruct students through descriptive statistics and
correlation principles and procedures to hypothesis tests and inferential data. It reflects on
concrete examples that students can see in a social work practice besides introducing core
principles.
Social Workers use statistics for research, primarily. Sometimes the research they need to
do is a program analysis to determine how effective a social program they have
established is. Social Workers do other kinds of social research, too. They may want to
sample several high school teenagers to learn about prevalence of drug use and what kind
of drugs are being used. They might want to do research about the effectiveness of a
particular mode of therapy and to do this they may ask other Social Workers to complete
questionnaires.
Statistics are useful for interpreting patterns among data points collected from a group
sample. In other words, when you have collected a bunch of data from a group of people
who make up your sample, statistics are used to analyze this data, to group it in various
ways that show relationships between the variables the questionnaires were designed to
produce. Ultimately, Social Workers try to draw conclusions from the patterns revealed.
Research hopefully provides us with a more realistic and accurate understanding of the
groups of people we work with.