A Practical Guide to Statistics for Health Research

This book provides an outline with methodological steps of how to use statistics to analyze your research data. The book begins with a general introduction, which discusses what you should be trying to achieve with your statistical analysis. This involves describing the subjects you investigated and their outcomes, determining whether there is statistically significant evidence of differences in outcomes between groups of subjects, quantitatively describing effect sizes, and also determining whether any changes are large enough to be of clinical significance. Next, the authors cover data types and choosing statistical tests.  This includes identifying the factor and outcome, and also identifying the type of data used to record the outcome. Readers are then introduced to multiple testing, the Chi-square test, and independent samples and the two-sample t-test. The Man-Whitney test is discussed, as well as the One-way ANOVA. Readers are taught how to Carrying out the Kruskal-Wallis test and the McNemar’s test. The Paired t-test is covered, as well as how to carry out the Wilcoxon paired samples test. Readers are shown how to carry out the repeated measures ANOVA and the Friedman test. This includes discussion of merits of change in median, change in proportions in categories, and changes in high/low categories. The book concludes with a discussion on correlation and regression methods, and a detailed analysis on Cronbach’s alpha.