It is the responsibility of the consultant to ask questions and try to make sure the ultimate purpose of the data analysis is understood. It's a good idea to be in communication from the very beginning of the project to the very end. If a designer designs the house and then buys materials all before talking to the builder, he may discover that the materials he bought will not work for the house he wants. He is then stuck with all of the material and is forced to go out and get all new materials. If the builder starts to build and fails to keep in touch with the designer he may find at the end of the project that there has been a fundamental problem in his work like he was holding the drawing upside down and built the house facing the wrong direction.
Similar things can happen between a statistician and a researcher.
If the researcher fails to consider the statistical methods that are available and what is required to apply those methods, he may find that he has a stack of worthless data that took years to collect. Likewise, if the statistician fails to communicate what he is doing to the researcher, he may find that when all is said and done, he has provided answers to questions that are meaningless to the researcher. If a designer has designed a house in order to sell it later, it is important that the designer be able to talk about what went into the house. The best way for this to happen is to have the builder show the designer what is going on in the building process at each step of the way, possibly having the designer help in the building. Similarly the ability to justify the statistical conclusions is also important for a researcher.