Statistics at Square One

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"This book is aimed at anyone who needs a basic introduction to statistics in the health sciences. It is based on many years' experience teaching first year medical and health science students. Many of the examples are taken from Primary Care in the UK, which is where I worked for many years. Throughout I have tried to emphasise that Medical Statistics is not just a bag of tricks, and there are many synergies between the methods. It is now over forty years since Swinscow's original edition, and each edition reflected changes in the understanding of medical statistics. Perhaps the greatest change has occurred since the previous edition,which appeared twelve years ago.Despite the efforts of medical statisticians, there was a widespread misuse of p-values,the cornerstone of conventional statistical inference. This led some journals to ban p-values altogether. It is my view that used properly the p-value is a useful concept but this book, as in previous editions of this book, concentrates on estimation rather than just hypothesis testing. The book tries to steer the reader away from an excessive devotion to p-values, to instil a proper appreciation of their usefulness and to emphasise estimation over significance testing"-- Provided by publisher