Introduction

The challenge in research is to prove observations and conclusions ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ (a common legal phrase). While most engineering research is numerically based and numbers are a prime outcome, some research is qualitatively based. In the latter research, one common method of analysis is to convert qualitative results to numbers and to use statistics to deduce the reliability of the outcomes and the conclusions. For this reason, regardless of the research methodology, researchers must pay particular attention to the use of statistics and the measures of uncertainty (experimental and modelling) in their research methods and in the development of conclusions.

It is expected that graduate engineers have already taken one or more courses in statistics. Readers are therefore referred to their undergraduate courses and the many reference books and internet references and software resources available (e.g. Matlab and MS Excel). This chapter provides a somewhat different approach to the standard undergraduate statistics textbooks [1–5], in order that engineers planning to undertake a research project have a fundamental understanding of statistics.