Fortunately, most current researchers utilize statisticians extensively. They try to find one early on in the development of their study, ask their advice on what tests to run, and once the data are collected, ask the statistician for help with the analyses. But I see looming on the horizon an attitude that the computer should be able to help arrive at decisions about these tests. There is the field of artificial intelligence that has been working hard the past 20 years to have computers do things like this for us. But so far, the fuzzy logic of artificial intelligence has yet to grasp the fine nuances of a field in which even the statisticians don t often agree.
Factor analysis is one such example.
Back in the early 70s, it was the test to run on multiple independent variables, then it fell out favor in the early 80s, and the world shifted to logistic regression. Now we see more studies using factor analysis again. The field of statistics is just not exact enough for a computer, with its zeros and ones, to be able to fully grasp. Neither is the area of protection of human subjects and even greater concern to me, the question of whether a study should even be done in the first place. With regard to human subjects, we are witnessing a sea change in the tolerance of IRBs toward researchers.