The Shrike
Philosopher
There is no statistical significance without data, and "data" is the plural of the singular, "datum". As EHocking offered, "repeatability" is the difference between your anecdotal observation and the multiple observations made by a scientist that comprise analyzable data.
Let's say I go do some bird surveys and find a Red-eyed Vireo singing from the top of a tall tree. Did I really see it and hear it as I remembered? I wrote it in my notes so at least there's a record that at that moment that's what I thought I experienced. The field notes are important because they remove the bias of my faulty memory trying to reconstruct the event hours, days, months, or even years later. But what if I was mistaken in that moment? What if I hallucinated the whole thing?
Well, I do multiple bird surveys. I go to many places that have tall trees. At each one, I am making an observation that can be a datum: 1 = Red-eyed Vireo detected, 0 = no Red-eyed Vireo detected. All those 1s and 0s from my multiple surveys are now plural - data. I have repeated that trial of "do Red-eyed Vireos sing from tall trees" many times over, and I can analyze those data.
If my sample size is too small, e.g., I only found 1 vireo total, then I really don't have that much to go on. Maybe I did hallucinate that one observation or maybe that 1 vireo was just way out of range and not behaving typically. It's only with a good sample of 1s and 0s (let's say something like at least 30 of each) that I'm confident that I have enough information to evaluate the habitat preferences of singing Red-eyed Vireos.
Let's say my analysis indicates that Red-eyed Vireos are far more likely to sing from tall trees than from any of the other habitat features I sampled. It's unlikely that if I hallucinate them that I'd do so in one habitat type more than another. I might, however, mistake the identification - maybe there's another species that sings from tall trees and sounds like a Red-eyed Vireo? (According to one of my field technicians, that other species is Summer Tanager!)
Well, the best thing for me to do is compare my analysis to those of the other people who've done bird surveys in similar places. If my findings, i.e., that Red-eyed Vireos like to sing from tall trees, fit in with the context of what we know collectively from many thousands of observations then we have greater confidence that my initial field observations were accurate.
In your case Jodie, you don't have data. In fact, without repeated observations, you cannot even consider each individual event to be a datum. You just have a handful of observations that you find to have been unusual. They are unrelated anecdotes, and subject to misinterpretation, hallucination, faulty memory, etc. in a way that properly collected scientific data are not.
