QMP Medical Statistics Tutorials: More about rates, ratios and risks
Posted on 9th July 2013 by Lucy Homer
What is it all about?
This is another statistics tutorial from the group that brought you Chi-squared and t-tests. This tutorial is building on the information and knowledge of a previous tutorial and so reading this in isolation is probably not recommended (unless you are very comfortable with your statistics and study designs). As with the other tutorials this comes with a list of reading materials to be read after you have completed the tutorial. At points though it refers to papers that are not open-access and thus you need to have a personal subscription/Athens account/Institution log-in to read the paper(s). After descriptions of the different observational studies, there are exercises to complete to aid and test understanding. At first glance one of these asks you, from excel, to calculate the p-value, which seems very daunting. Cleverly though, the authors explain how to do this using excel, thus avoiding having to explain how to do this in a plethora of different statistical packages that the reader may, or may not, have access too. For those high-flyers who want a further challenge there are links for advanced students.
This tutorial is most suitable for those who have a good grounding in statistics and study design or who are developing on knowledge from the aforementioned other tutorial.
This helps the reader develop on key data derived from each study design and the clinical implications of this. It took a while to read as I had to go back and read the previous tutorial first.