Guides to Good Statistical Practice

DFID funded the production of a series of guides on good statistical practice, intended primarily to give help to research and support staff in development projects. The guides are available to read online or to download for printing and reading offline. Most of them were rewritten and published in 2004 as a book.

 NEW  Produced under DFID's Research Into Use Programme (managed by NR International and funded by DFID):

• Competent Data Management, Part 1: Elements of a Data Entry System (pdf)
• Competent Data Management, Part 2: Illustrating the Process using CS-Pro (pdf)

Option 1: Read the Guides Online

General Overview

• Statistical Guidelines for Natural Resources Projects
• Writing Research Protocols - a statistical perspective (pdf)
• Writing Up Research - a statistical perspective (pdf)

Guides on Planning

• Concepts Underlying The Design of Experiments
• Some Basic Ideas of Sampling
• Guidelines for Planning Effective Surveys
• On-Farm Trials - Some Biometric Guidelines
• One Animal per Farm

Guides on Data Management

• Data Management Guidelines for Experimental Projects
• Excel for Statistics: Tips and Warnings
• Disciplined Use of Spreadsheet Packages for Data Entry
• The Role of a Database Package in Managing Research Data
• Project Data Archiving - Lessons from a Case Study
• Moving on from MSTAT (to GenStat)

Guides on Analysis

• Confidence and Significance: Key Concepts of Inferential Statistics
• The Statistical Background to ANOVA
• Modern Approaches to the Analysis of Experimental Data
• Approaches to the Analysis of Survey Data
• Modern Methods of Analysis
• Mixed Models and Multilevel Data Structures in Agriculture

Guides on Presentation

• Informative Presentation of Tables, Graphs and Statistics

Option 2: Download the Guides

The individual guides are available for download in two formats, to serve different purposes. These formats are Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and Portable Document Format (.pdf) - the information below will help you decide which you need.

HTML is the format recognised by web browsers. You may want to download the guides in this format so that you can read the web pages from your local hard disk and thus reduce the time you spend connected to the internet. The appearance of the guides will be the same as when viewed online.

PDF is a standard format established by Adobe. It is useful for viewing documents on the screen in a way that looks just like the printed page. To view PDF files, you first need to install a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader (available for downloading free from Adobe). The Acrobat Reader will also enable you to print the documents.

The guides have also been combined into a single Windows "help-file"; this format is useful on computers that do not have a web-browser installed.

Continue with downloading.

Last updated 13 May, 2009