What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here

You're probably wondering why you have bought this book. Maybe you liked the pictures, maybe you fancied doing some weight training (it is heavy), or perhaps you needed to reach something in a high place (it is thick). The chances are, though, that given the choice of spending your hard-earned cash on a statistics book or something more entertaining (a nice novel, a trip to the cinema, etc.) you'd choose the latter. So, why have you bought the book (or downloaded an illegal PDF of it from someone who has way too much time on their hands if they can scan a 900-page textbook)? It's likely that you obtained it because you're doing a course on statistics, or you're doing some research, and you need to know how to analyse data. It's possible that you didn't realize when you started your course or research that you'd have to know about statistics but now find yourself inexplicably wading, neck high, through the Victorian sewer that is data analysis. The reason why you're in the mess that you find yourself in is that you have a curious mind. You might have asked yourself questions like why people behave the way they do (psychology), why behaviours differ across cultures (anthropology), how businesses maximize their profit (business), how the dinosaurs died (palaeontology), whether eating tomatoes protects you against cancer (medicine, biology), whether it is possible to build a quantum computer (physics, chemistry), whether the planet is hotter than it used to be and where (geography, environmental studies). Whatever it is you're studying or researching, the reason why you're studying it is probably that you're interested in answering questions. Scientists are curious people, and you probably are too. However, it might not have occurred to you that to answer interesting questions, you need two things: data and an explanation for those data.

The answer to 'what the hell are you doing here?' is, therefore, simple: to answer interesting questions you need data. One of the reasons why your evil statistics lecturer is forcing you to learn about numbers is that they are a form of data and are vital to the research process. Of course there are forms of data other than numbers that can be used to test and generate theories. When numbers are involved the research involves quantitative methods, but you can also generate and test theories by analysing language (such as conversations, magazine articles, media broadcasts, etc.). This involves qualitative methods and it is a topic for another book not written by me. People can get quite passionate about which of these methods is best, which is a bit silly because they are complementary, not competing, approaches and there are much more important issues in the world to get upset about. Having said that, all qualitative research is rubbish.¹

¹This is a joke. Like many of my jokes, there are people who won't find it remotely funny. Passions run high between qualitative and quantitative researchers, so its inclusion will likely result in me being hunted down, locked in a room and forced to do discourse analysis by a hoard of rabid qualitative researchers.