  The study of solar eruptive events and associated phenomena is of great
importance in the context of solar and heliophysics. Coronal mass ejections
(CMEs) and coronal waves are energetic manifestations of the restructuring of
the solar magnetic field and mass motion of the plasma. Characterising this
motion is vital for deriving the dynamics of these events and thus
understanding the physics driving their initiation and propagation. The
development and use of appropriate methods for measuring event kinematics is
therefore imperative. Traditional approaches to the study of CME and coronal
wave kinematics do not return wholly accurate nor robust estimates of the true
event kinematics and associated uncertainties. We highlight the drawbacks of
these approaches, and demonstrate improved methods for accurate and reliable
determination of the kinematics. The Savitzky-Golay filter is demonstrated as a
more appropriate fitting technique for CME and coronal wave studies, and a
residual resampling bootstrap technique is demonstrated as a statistically
rigorous method for the determination of kinematic error estimates and
goodness-of-fit tests. It is shown that the scatter on distance-time
measurements of small sample size can significantly limit the ability to derive
accurate and reliable kinematics. This may be overcome by (i) increasing
measurement precision and sampling cadence, and (ii) applying robust methods
for deriving the kinematics and reliably determining their associated
uncertainties. If a priori knowledge exists and a pre-determined model form for
the kinematics is available (or indeed any justified fitting-form to be tested
against the data), then its precision can be examined using a bootstrapping
technique to determine the confidence interval associated with the
model/fitting parameters.
