Why Statistics
American Statistical Association's Statistical Significance https://www.amstat.org/policy-and-advocacy/statistical-significance-series "highlights the contributions statisticians make to society, from health care and economy to national security and the environment."
The International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP) https://iase-web.org/islp/ Goal is to "contribute to promoting statistical literacy across the world"
Why nurses need to understand statistics https://online.okcu.edu/nursing/blog/why-nurses-need-to-understand-statistics
Experience and instinct aren’t enough to help you make the right decisions in patient care. Understanding medical research and how it applies to current practice means nurses must be able to interpret statistics.
“Some new methods are statistically significant and sound, while others may need more investigation. For nurses to be autonomous in their practice, they have to know how to interpret findings.” Nursing consultant Dr. Pamela Stokes, MHCA, DNP, RN.
My own opinion: Using statistics, you may sometimes get things wrong, but if you don't use statistics, you will almost always get things wrong.
Statistics books, guides
What statistics should I use https://stats.oarc.ucla.edu/other/mult-pkg/whatstat/ UCLA's guide
Arsham, Hossein. Statistical Thinking for Managerial Decisions https://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbarsh/Business-stat/opre504.htm 2015
CADDIS Volume 4: Data Analysis https://www.epa.gov/caddis/caddis-volume-4-data-analysis basic concepts, of basic stat and some advanced stat too. Last updated 2024.
Dabbling in the Data. A Hands-on Guide to Participatory Data Analysis https://www.publicprofit.net/dabbling-in-the-data-a-hands-on-guide-to-participatory-data-analysis/ from Public Profit. "This guide provides a gentle introduction to practical approaches to explore and analyze data" No date given.
Engineering Statistics https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm although much is for engineers, some is also useful for social research. For example a chapter on exploratory analysis has a section about graphing the data. Another section on quantitative techniques describes many of the usual statistical tests used in social science. 2012
Gustman, Burt. Stat Primer https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/gerstman/StatPrimer/ an on line public domain stat manual. 2016.
Hopkins, Will G. A New View of Statistics https://www.sportsci.org/resource/stats/index.html all the usual topics, but pretty comprehensive (from 2016).
Illowsky, Barbara and Susan Dean. Collaborative Statistics https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/11 Illowsky and Dean are faculty members at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Around 2013
Illowsky, Barbara and Susan Dean. Introductory Statistics. 2013. https://openstax.org/books/introductory-statistics/pages/1-introduction "Introductory Statistics is intended for the one-semester introduction to statistics course for students who are not mathematics or engineering majors. It focuses on the interpretation of statistical results, especially in real world settings" These two books may be the same, just published in different sites.
Jenkins-Smith, Hank, Joseph Ripberger, Gary Copeland, Matthew Nowlin, Tyler Hughes, Aaron Fister, Wesley Wehde. Quantitative Research Methods for Political Science, Public Policy and Public Administration (With Applications in R) - 3rd Edition. https://shareok.org/items/76bc8ffa-e266-4301-ae5d-47402145ce3d 2017
Kozak, Kathryn, Statistics Using Technology 3rd Edition. https://www.coconino.edu/open-source-textbooks#statistics-using-technology-3rd-edition-by-kathryn-kozak 2020.
Lane, David. HyperStat https://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html HyperStat Online is an introductory-level hypertext statistics book. Also comprehensive links to other on line stat books and links to some stat jokes. Looks like last revised in 2013.
Lane, David and others. Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study https://onlinestatbook.com A public domain on line stat multi media course (although to me it looks like an on line text book.) Includes the stat book in various forms, web, interactive on itunes, mobile, pdf. No date given.
Richard Lowry. Concepts and Applications of Inferential Statistics http://vassarstats.net/textbook/ Basics, t-tests, anova. Last updated in 2023. Lowry is Professor of Psychology Emeritus. Vassar College
McDonald, John H. Handbook of biological statistics https://www.biostathandbook.com for biology but much is applicable to any field. 2014. McDonald is professor of biology at University of Delaware.
Royal Statistical Society, RSS guide to statistics on social media: sound or suspicious? https://rss.org.uk/RSS/media/File-library/Policy/2024/RSS-guide-to-statistics-on-social-media.pdf Right now, 7/8/2024, it's also on this page about the general election. https://rss.org.uk/policy-campaigns/policy/our-work-on-the-2024-general-election/
StatCan. Statistics: power from data https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/edu/power-pouvoir/toc-tdm/5214718-eng.htm This is "a training tool for students, teachers and the general population that will help them in getting the most from statistics." A general on line stat book with chapters about data collection, processing, problems, presenting, analyzing. 2021.
Stark, Philip B. SticiGui: Statistics Tools for Internet and Classroom Instruction with a Graphical User Interface https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/index.htm includes a text book on basics and advanced basics. 2021
Stockburger, David. Introductory Statistics https://dwstockburger.com/Introbook/sbk.htm and Multivariate Statistics https://dwstockburger.com/Multibook/mbk.htm 2016. Dr. Stockburger is from Missouri State University
UCLA. Probability and statistics EBook http://wiki.stat.ucla.edu/socr/index.php/EBook General book. No author given, 2014.
Bayesian Inference
Rens van de Schoot. A gentle introduction to Bayesian Analysis https://www.rensvandeschoot.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-bayesian-analysis-applications-to-developmental-research/ blog, 2014
Stata has this: What is Bayesian analysis. https://www.stata.com/features/overview/bayesian-intro/
The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) http://bayesian.org/ has a brief description of bayesian inference.
Bayesian Statistics http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bayesian_statistics from Scholarpedia. 2009.
Clyde, Merlise and others, An Introduction to Bayesian Thinking. https://statswithr.github.io/book/index.html Has this chapter: The Basics of Bayesian Statistics https://statswithr.github.io/book/the-basics-of-bayesian-statistics.html last updated in 2022.
Guidance for the Use of Bayesian Statistics in Medical Device Clinical Trials https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-use-bayesian-statistics-medical-device-clinical-trials 2010. This guidebook from the FDA explains bayesian methods "Bayesian statistics is an approach for learning from evidence as it accumulates. In clinical trials, traditional (frequentist) statistical methods may use information from previous studies only at the design stage. Then, at the data analysis stage, the information from these studies is considered as a complement to, but not part of, the formal analysis. In contrast, the Bayesian approach uses Bayes’ Theorem to formally combine prior information with current information on a quantity of interest. The Bayesian idea is to consider the prior information and the trial results as part of a continual data stream, in which inferences are being updated each time new data become available."
Bayesian perspectives for epidemiological research: I. Foundations and basic methods https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/35/3/765/735529 2006. by Sander Greenland. I have to read this article again to understand what it says, but it's in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Bayesian Statistics in Oncology https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cncr.24628 by Adamina, Tomlinson and Guller. 2009. Also some explanation.
Bayesian statistics made (as) simple (as possible) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bobeo5kFz1g lecture. Look at it starting about 7 or 8 minutes in. This is from Allen Downey
http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2012/03/bayesian-statistics-made-simple.html Dr. Downey is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. https://www.olin.edu/bios/allen-downey
Bayesian Statistics http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFHD4aOUZFp0Xhzd5j1nWnExD54xJfnJX from Jarad Niemi, from Iowa State University, Department of Statistics
http://stat.iastate.edu/people/jarad-niemi These are for his Intro to Bayesian Statistics class.
Bayesian inference for categorical data analysis http://www.stat.ufl.edu/~aa/cda/cda.html Alan Agresti and David Hitchcock, 2005 See the bottom of the page for links to the paper.
Jim Berger, Professor of Statistics http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/ has a paper The interplay between Bayesian and frequentist analysis. Bayarri, M.J. and Berger, J. (2004) `Statistical Science', which says statisticians need both Bayesian and frequentist approaches.
Propensity Score Analysis
Antonio Olmos, Priyalatha Govindasamy. Propensity Scores: A Practical Introduction Using R. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation. Vol 11 No 25 (2015) http://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/431
Inacio, Maria and others. Statistics in Brief: An Introduction to the Use of Propensity Scores. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 2015 Aug; 473(8): 2722–2726. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4488189/
Columbia has this intro. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/research/population-health-methods/propensity-score-analysis
Epidemiology
Epidemiology. Authors: Helen Barratt and Maria Kirwan 2009. Revised in 2018 by Saran Shantikumar. https://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/public-health-textbook/research-methods/1a-epidemiology
Blogs
MD Science Consulting, Patrick Murphy and Heather Duncan, have a set of blog posts about Data Analysis https://www.mdscienceconsulting.com/blog-1/tags/data-analysis including posts like "Power Matters, and We Don’t Talk about It Enough", "A (Mostly) Math-Free Primer on P-values and Confidence Intervals" and "What is Confounding, and Why Does It Matter?"
Sites listing other statistics sites
Betty Jung's Statistics page http://www.bettycjung.net/Statsites.htm has links to many stat sites, on a wide variety of topics.
Probability and Statistics Resources http://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbarsh/Business-stat/R.htm Professor Hossein Arsham
StatSci http://www.statsci.org/index.html intended to be a stats portal
Last revised and validated 6/15/2024