STM publisher Elsevier Australia has announced a new local publication titled Vital Statistics: an introduction to health science statistics. The book is projected to help the nation's health science students to understand the whys, hows and whens of health science statistics.
The book seeks to establish the importance of understanding statistics, presenting it as a 'modern life skill' rather than an academic discipline, and demonstrating its usefulness in the real world, as well as in stats exams. It is written specifically for health science students and it relies on local and health-related examples.
The authors, Dr Stephen McKenzie and Dr Dean McKenzie, have dubbed the book 'friendly, familiar and foolproof'. It is expected that their use of clear, plain language will help simplify concepts that may, at first, seem irrelevant to students contemplating careers as health practitioners.
The book also explores the way data relates to information, and how information relates to knowledge. It shows students how to use health science statistics to distinguish information from disinformation, while addressing the importance of probability and examining the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods.
This Australian statistics textbook is said to delve deeper into the statistical field, covering inferential statistics, and showing students how to infer from samples to populations.
The authors walk their readers through the appropriate application and interpretation of statistical measures of difference and association, and acknowledge the vital importance of computers in the statistical analysis of data.
