• Question: why do several repeated measurements provide data that can be used whith more confidence

    Asked by cherry16 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      It’s to do with chance or probability.

      Imagine tossing a coin. We would expect that it would land heads half the time and tails half the time. However, you could only be confident that this was true if you tossed the coin a lot of times. Eventually you would toss the coin enough times that you would have half the results as heads and half the results as tails.

      Scientific experiments are the same. We always want to make sure that the result we see isn’t due to chance. So repeating the experiment again and again will make sure that it didn’t happen by chance and in fact is a true result. This gives you much more confidence in your finding.

    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Repeating your measurements lets you know that what you’re seeing isn’t just down to chance. It also lets you know how precise your measurements are.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      if you repeat an experiment using the same method your results should only be slightly different from each other making the data reliable and not just down to chance.

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      If you do something once and something happens you do not know if they are linked – does doing A cause B to happen? By repeating the same experiment we become more sure that the link between A and B is real and not just due to random variations in our experiment.

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