As a professional statistician, I help doctoral students design quantitative research studies, and analyze and interpret their data, for their dissertation. It occurred to me that some aspects of a doctoral dissertation could be applied to social media communications to make information and conversations more rigorous and tractable. If all you have is a hammer, is every problem a nail? My answer: No. If all you have is a hammer, it simply means you are only going to be able to solve problems that involve driving nails. My point is this, as a professional statistician, I help doctoral students design quantitative research studies, and analyze and interpret their data, for their dissertation. Thus, I tend to think about research problems from a quantitative perspective. Although many research problems cannot be studied quantitatively (e.g. we may not yet know how to …
