Identify a peer-reviewed article that presents statistical analysis of a pertinent topic of public health interest or importance. Provide a link to this article and give a brief summary of the article, including hypotheses, methods, and findings.
Research the topic and available data sources. On the basis of the biostatistical methods you have learned about in this course, analyze the article and its findings.
• What data are available on this topic?
• What data does the article use?
o Discuss the level of measurement, assumptions that can be made, statistics that can be calculated from these data, and the general quality of the data.
• What is the type of study or study design used?
o Explain the type of biostatistical study design that the author has used.
o Describe the hypothesis or hypotheses that the author intends to test.
o Explain the statistics that the author uses to test these hypotheses.
• What are the article's statistical findings?
o Describe the statistical results of the author's analysis.
o Provide a substantive interpretation of these findings (What do the results mean in relation to the hypotheses and the public health topic?).
o Describe the author's recommendations about this topic based on his or her findings and hypotheses.
• If you had been the author, what changes, if any, would you have made in the study you analyzed?
o Discuss whether the author made any statistical errors.
• Were the correct data used for the questions asked?
• Were the correct data available?
• Were the correct statistics used for the data available?
• What other data might you want to collect and why?
• Do the statistical findings support the author's conclusions?