Statistics plays a major part in almost all medical studies from epidemiology to clinical research. In most clinical trials and behavioral studies, an assessment of statistical considerations usually dictates beforehand the type and amount of data that needs to be collected and provides the technical or procedural framework for an experiment. Without such an assessment, a researcher could collect the wrong data for the explicit question being asked or not collect enough proper data and thus resign the results to 80 percent accuracy, when a few more data points may have assured 98 percent accuracy. Some statistics software packages (such as, STATGRAPHICS from Manugistics, SAS from SAS Institute, and SPSS by SPSS), provide the capability to perform this type of assessment.
The most common type of statistics seen in the scientific literature is descriptive statistics, which includes means, medians, standard deviations, variances, coefficients of variation, and the like. These are ...
