1.6 Summary

This introductory chapter provides some of the basic concepts of statistics, gives an overview of statistics as a scientific discipline, and shows that the results of a statistical analysis can be no better than the data collected. You've seen that the researcher must be vigilant about biases that can enter into a data set from a multitude of sources. With this in mind, it is important to emphasize the correct application of statistical techniques in study design and data collection as well as at the analysis stage.

Statistical methods used to characterize populations from sample data can be classified as descriptive or inferential, most notably, parameter estimates by confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. These techniques are the focus of the methods presented in this book, Chapters 4 through 22.