| Title: | SPSS for Starters and 2nd Levelers |
| Authors: | . Cleophas, Ton J |
| Keywords: | Medicine SPSS for Starters and 2nd Levelers |
| Issue Date: | 2016 |
| Publisher: | Springer |
| Abstract: | This small book addresses different kinds of data files, as commonly encountered in clinical research and their data analysis on SPSS software. Some 15 years ago serious statistical analyses were conducted by specialist statisticians using main- frame computers. Nowadays, there is ready access to statistical computing using personal computers or laptops, and this practice has changed boundaries between basic statistical methods that can be conveniently carried out on a pocket calculator and more advanced statistical methods that can only be executed on a computer. Clinical researchers currently perform basic statistics without professional help from a statistician, including t-tests and chi-square tests. With the help of user- friendly software, the step from such basic tests to more complex tests has become smaller and more easy to take. It is our experience as masters’ and doctorate class teachers of the European College of Pharmaceutical Medicine (EC Socrates Project, Lyon, France) that students are eager to master adequate command of statistical software for that purpose. However, doing so, albeit easy, it still takes 20–50 steps from logging in to the final result, and all of these steps have to be learned in order for the procedures to be successful. |
| Description: | The current book has been made intentionally small, avoiding theoretical dis- cussions and highlighting technical details. This means that this book is unable to explain how certain steps were made and why certain conclusions were drawn. For that purpose additional study is required, and we recommend that the textbook “Statistics Applied to Clinical Trials,” Springer 2009, Dordrecht, Netherlands, by the same authors, be used for that purpose, because the current text is much complementary to the text of the textbook. We have to emphasize that automated data analysis carries a major risk of fallacies. Computers cannot think and can only execute commands as given. As an example, regression analysis usually applies independent and dependent variables, often interpreted as causal factors and outcome factors. For example, gender or age may determine the type of operation or type of surgeon. The type of surgeon does not determine the age and gender. Yet a software program does not have difficulty to use nonsense determinants, and the investigator in charge of the analysis has to decide what is caused by what, because a computer cannot do things like that, although they are essential to the analysis. The same is basically true with any statistical tests assessing the effects of causal factors on health outcomes. At the completion of each test as described in this book, a brief clinical interpretation of the main results is given in order to compensate for the abundance of technical information. The actual calculations made by the software are not always required for understanding the test, but some understanding may be helpful and can also be found in the above textbook. We hope that the current book is small enough for those not fond on statistics but fond on statistically proven hard data in order to start on SPSS, a software program with an excellent state of the art for clinical data analysis. Moreover, it is very satisfying to prove from your own data that your own prior hypothesis was true, and it is even more satisfying if you are able to produce the very proof yourself. |
| URI: | http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/245 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-319-20600-4 |
| Appears in Collections: | ARTS & SCIENCE |
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016_Book_SPSSForStartersAnd2ndLevelers.pdf | 4.08 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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