| dc.description.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 mainframe
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 userfriendly
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.
The current book has been made intentionally small, avoiding theoretical discussions
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. | en_US |
