The Façade of Precision in Education Data and Statistics: a Troubling Example from Tanzania

Abstract

To understand what people do and why, we need to know something about what they have done. Rarely, however, are social scientists direct observers of all events of interest to them. Hence, most often we rely on information that someone else has collected, more or less systematically, usually for some other purpose. The behavioural revolution in the social sciences, with its shrill cries of ‘falsifiability!’ and ‘reproducibility!’, has pushed us towards the sort of evidence that can be recorded and stored in quantitative form. It has as well urged us towards increasingly complex, and perhaps sophisticated, techniques for exploring relationship within that evidence.