Hi Erin,
I have a few remarks based on your comments:
- First and foremost, I really think you should try and contact a statistician at your university to help you out on ways to analyze this data. I am not a statistician myself, nor researcher at the moment (although I have an MSc in Biology), but I have never understood the great reluctance of some researchers to call in external help on this. They spend years and tons of money collecting data, and than "forget" the need for proper analysis. Even if it is "just" a master thesis, you have collected data that may be valuable to others and your guiding professors / PhD students. Yes, the statisticians may be busy and difficult to get hold of, but may be of invaluable help in showing you the ways to handle your data.
- You suggest having multiple factors influencing your growth / yield data (soil parameters, treatment types). Many of these may be correlated to each other. You may not get significant results putting one parameter (e.g. soil nitrogen content) against the yield data. Often, it may be necessary to analyse all data / multiple parameters at once, in one statistical analysis. You may either need or want to bundle multiple dependent or independent variables to get meaningful results. There are methods for that in statistical packages, e.g. like the MANOVA I wrote, but there are others as well. Have a clear look at all the options in the statistical package, or read Wikipedia pages etc., so as to understand the uses of different methods of analysing your data.
- You wrote: The issue for my data is that well its kinda "parabola shaped"
Often, it is necessary to normalize your data by applying a transformation, e.g. taking the log of measurements before analysing the data. Most statistical methods assume normal distributions of the datasets, if your data isn't, you should transform it before analysis. Most statistical packages, and also ESRI's Geostatistical Analyst, offer options for testing for normality, and allow you to choose a proper transformation that best fits your data.
- I also think you should have clear Hypothesis in order to test your data statistically. I get the feeling you are still in the process of trying to find out what questions you exactly want to answer... while already having collected all the data!
- Based on your additional information in your last post, this re-affirms my believe you should first analyse the data using normal statistical methods before venturing into the world of "geostatistics". I don't think this kind of data is well suited to geostatistical analysis.