Scientific research is a multi-step process. Scientists study a phenomenon and use data to advance and create new knowledge. This new research will then contribute to the ever-growing scientific community. As I said earlier, scientific research is a multi-step process.
Let’s take a look at a simple example.
The first thing to do is obviously to pick a subject. Let’s choose an arbitrary topic, like the impact of smoking on your lungs and body.
After having picked our subject, we now have to ask a question. The question must involve (how, what, when, who, which, where, or why). In this case, the question could be something like ‘What are the long-term effects of smoking?’
Next, you have to make predictions(hypothesis). For example, you could predict that smoking increases the probability of getting lung cancer by 50%.
After making your predictions, you then gather data. Usually you want to gather multiple sources of data, but we will only use a single source for today’s example.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/smoking-big-problem-in-brief
Now that we have our data, we have to analyse and interpret it. As you can see, the rate of lung cancer deaths increases and decreases in relation with the amount of cigarettes sold per adult per day.
The difference between analysing and interpreting is that analysing is finding patterns, while interpreting is explaining them.
Finally, we need to draw our conclusions. For example: In conclusion, after analysing the data, I proved that my hypothesis was correct, and that an increase in cigarette sales does in fact augment the number of lung cancer cases and deaths.
Catch you guys in the next article!