The terms "statistical analysis" and "data analysis" can be said to mean the same thing -- the study of how we describe, combine, and make inferences based on numbers. A lot of people are scared of numbers (quantiphobia), but data analysis with statistics has got less to do with numbers, and more to do with rules for arranging them. It even lets you create some of those rules yourself, so instead of looking at it like a lot of memorization, it's best to see it as an extension of the research mentality, something researchers do anyway (i.e., play with or crunch numbers). Once you realize that YOU have complete and total power over how you want to arrange numbers, your fear of them will disappear. It helps, of course, if you know some basic algebra and arithmetic, at a level where you might be comfortable solving the following equation
There are three (3) general areas that make up the field of statistics: descriptive statistics, relational statistics, and inferential statistics. 1. Descriptive statistics fall into one of two categories: measures of central tendency (mean, median, and mode) or measures of dispersion (standard deviation and variance). Their purpose is to explore hunches that may have come up during the course of the research process, but most people compute them to look at the normality of their numbers. Examples include descriptive analysis of sex, age, race, social class, and so forth. 2. Relationalstatistics fall into one of three categories: univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis. Univariate analysis is the study of one variable for a subpopulation, for example, age of murderers, and the analysis is often descriptive, but you'd be surprised how many advanced statistics can be computed using just one variable. Bivariate analysis is the study of a relationship between two variables, for example, murder and meanness, and the most