Nursing professionals' attitudes toward biostatistics: an international web-based survey

Abstract

Objectives: The present study, an international web-based survey, was focused on four aims: to obtain nursing professional's self-reported statistical knowledge levels and how this knowledge varies by research area, to investigate and specify when biostatistics courses should be taught in nursing education and to identify the key statistical methods relevant to nursing education. Methods: A total of 448 nursing professionals from five continents and 52 countries participated in our study. For the data comparison, Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test were applied. Results: The results indicate that while nursing professionals place an emphasis on biostatistics education, the majority state that biostatistics education should be taken both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level and the participants also believe that taking a biostatistics course is useful for their occupation. A biostatistics education should also emphasize the necessity of consulting to a biostatistician when planning a study. Conclusion: Our study provides information regarding self-reported levels of biostatistical knowledge of nursing professionals by research area and academic position, and provides guidance regarding the ideal semester for administering a biostatistics course.

The opinion of sports science professionals for the benefit of statistics: an international web-based survey

“…Since the present study is also multinational, it is likely that the undergraduate and graduate curricula that include the statistical course vary from country to country. Also, this finding is consistent with previous studies [2][3][4][5]. As in medicine, veterinary, dentistry and nursing; it is not surprising to see that the importance of statistics is also given in sports sciences.…”

“…In the present study, it is aimed to examine whether this importance has changed according to the subbranches of sports sciences and whether the participants are academic staff or not. Similar to our previous studies [2][3][4][5][6], it is seen that statistics (to the biostatistics in the sports sciences undergraduate and graduate education curriculum) are also given importance in sports sciences. However, this emphasis on statistics did not differ according to whether the participants were academic staff or not.…”

“…With the experience of our previous studies, researchers tend to prefer statistical software with the user interface in their work. As in our previous studies [2][3][4][5], SPSS is the software that the participants prefer in statistical analysis. In our study, as in our previous studies, participants highlighted the SPSS program as a tool to transfer their statistical skills to their scientific research.…”

“…In the first part of the survey, subjects were asked whether a statistics or biostatistics course would be useful for their future careers (from "completely disagree: 1"; to "completely agree: 5"), at which semester or semesters should statistics or biostatistics be administered, and how much importance they placed on statistics (from "not important: 0"; to "very important: 10"). In the second section of the survey, the subjects were asked which statistical methods, tests and techniques they knew, out of 54 methods and techniques which referenced based on our previous studies [2][3][4][5]. Only self-reported general knowledge about the procedures was assessed.…”

“…Many T studies in the literature evaluated the importance given to statistics according to various disciplines. While some of these studies [2][3][4][5][6] examined the importance of statistics regarding the authors who submitted their studies to the journals, some of them [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] focused on the statistical errors in the articles published in scientific journals and aimed to emphasize the importance given to the statistics regarding journals. In addition to this statistics-based press, scientific journals sometimes try to fulfill their mission by publishing articles aimed at informing their readers about basic statistical concepts and sometimes informing them about the advanced statistical methods specific to their disciplines.…”