Statistical Advisory Service

The School of Mathematics and Statistics provides a statistical advisory service for all OU researchers – including students, staff, and research technicians – on the quantitative aspects of research problems in a wide variety of fields.

We can provide guidance on:

• the design of your experiment or survey
• describing and understanding your data
• formulating research hypotheses
• choosing appropriate statistical methods to use
• analysing your data
• and interpreting your outputs.

We recommend that you contact the advisory service as early as possible in your research process, so that you can be supported in designing your study most appropriately, which will yield the most suitable data for your research question. Nonetheless, if you already have some data that you need looking into, we can assist with that too.

If you are preparing a grant proposal which will involve quantitative data of any sort, then we recommend contacting the advisory service, so that you can receive support in designing the research methods section of your proposal appropriately.

There are no fees for the advisory service. Therefore the pro bono contributions of our academics need to be acknowledged in an appropriate way, which can be discussed with the academic once you are assigned one.

• If you are conducting research that will produce some professional output such as research publications, this could be done by including the academic as a co-author.
• If you are writing a grant proposal, then this would ideally be done by having their time contributions costed in the grant application.
• If you are applying for Open Societal Challenges (OSC), you could include the academic as a co-applicant.

Staff who wish for statistical help should email stats-advisory@open.ac.uk​​​​ with a summary of:

• the issue
• what you require
• who is/are working on it, from which school
• timescale.

The Statistical Advisory Service is coordinated by Kaustubh Adhikari.