| dc.description.abstract | The time that statistical analyses, including analysis of variance and regression
analyses, were analyzed by statistical analysts has gone for good, thanks to the
availability of user-friendly statistical software. The teaching department, the
educations committee, and the scientific committee of the Albert Schweitzer
Hospital, Dordrecht, the Netherlands, are pleased to announce that since November
2009, the entire staff and personnel are able to perform statistical analyses with the
help of SPSS Statistical Software in their offices through the institution’s intranet.
It is our experience as master’s and doctorate class teachers of the European
College of Pharmaceutical Medicine (EC Socrates Project) that students are eager
to master adequate command of statistical software for carrying out their own
statistical analyses. However, students often lack adequate knowledge of basic
principles, and this carries the risk of fallacies. Computers cannot think and can
only execute commands as given. As an example, regression analysis usually
applies independent and dependent variables, often interpreted as causal factors
and outcome factors. For example, gender and age may determine the type of
operation or the type of surgeon. The type of surgeon does not determine the age
and gender. Yet, software programs have no difficulty to use nonsense determinants,
and the investigator in charge of the analysis has to decide what is caused by
what, because a computer cannot do a thing like that, although it is essential to the
analysis.
It is our experience that a pocket calculator is very helpful for the purpose of
studying the basic principles. Also, a number of statistical methods can be
performed more easily on a pocket calculator, than using a software program. | en_US |
