You’ve picked your test. You’ve even run it. And you’re staring at the output with a familiar, sinking feeling: I don’t actually know what this number means.
This is one of the most common — and most quietly avoided — points in a quantitative MBA or DBA dissertation. I want to say clearly, because I think it gets misdiagnosed often: this usually isn’t a capability problem. Most students at this level are perfectly capable of understanding statistics. It’s that the stakes feel enormous — get it wrong and your entire analysis chapter is compromised — while the underlying concepts were often taught once, in an undergraduate stats module years ago, and never properly consolidated since.
Why Avoidance Feels Safer Than It Is
When a task feels high-stakes and your understanding feels shaky, avoidance is a genuinely rational-feeling response in the moment. Re-reading the same explainer article for the fifth time feels like progress, because you’re “doing something” about statistics. Running the test and hoping the output “looks about right,” without being sure why, feels like forward motion. Neither actually builds the understanding you’ll need later — particularly in your viva, where an examiner can ask you to explain your results in your own words, not recite a definition you looked up the night before.
The postponement also compounds. The longer analysis is delayed, the more pressure builds around it, which makes the avoidance harder to break, not easier.
What Genuine Understanding Actually Requires
Understanding a statistical test, for the purposes of a dissertation, doesn’t mean being able to derive the formula from first principles. It means being able to answer three questions about your own results, in plain language, without notes: What question is this test actually answering? What does this specific output tell me about my data? And what would a different result have meant instead?
That third question is the one avoidance skips most consistently, and it’s often the most revealing. If you can’t say what a non-significant result would have meant for your study, there’s a good chance you’re pattern-matching the output (“p is below 0.05, so this is good”) rather than genuinely understanding it.
Two Ways to Build That Understanding
I work with students on quantitative analysis in two different ways, depending on what’s useful for a given situation. Sometimes it makes sense to coach you through running your own tests, step by step, so you build the skill directly. Other times — particularly under real time pressure, or with more complex analyses — it makes more sense for me to run the test myself (when allowed by the institution) and then walk you through exactly what it shows, why, and how to explain it, so you leave with genuine understanding of your own results rather than a printout you’re hoping nobody probes too closely.
Either route is built around the same principle: you should be able to stand in a viva and explain your findings in your own words, under questioning, because you actually understand them — not because you memorised a paragraph.
FAQ
Do I need to become a statistician to pass my viva? No. Examiners are testing whether you understand what your specific analysis shows and why you chose it — not whether you could teach the underlying statistical theory from scratch.
What if I’ve already run my analysis and I’m still not sure what it means? That’s a very common and entirely fixable position to be in. It’s usually faster to walk through your existing output together than to start over.
Is it acceptable to have someone else run my statistical tests? Norms vary by institution, so this is worth checking against your specific programme’s guidelines. What matters most for your viva, regardless of who ran the test, is that you can explain and defend the results yourself.
Next Step
If statistics anxiety is where your dissertation has stalled, that’s a solvable problem, not a character flaw — and it doesn’t need to stay stalled until submission. I offer a free 15-minute introductory call to talk through where you’re stuck.