Research methodology in dentistry: Part II - The relevance of statistics in research

Abstract

The lifeline of original research depends on adept statistical analysis. However, there have been reports of statistical misconduct in studies that could arise from the inadequate understanding of the fundamental of statistics. There have been several reports on this across medical and dental literature. This article aims at encouraging the reader to approach statistics from its logic rather than its theoretical perspective. The article also provides information on statistical misuse in the Journal of Conservative Dentistry between the years 2008 and 2011

Periodontal research: Basics and beyond - Part II (ethical issues, sampling, outcome measures and bias)

“…Secondly, what is the level of α or β errors that we are willing to accept? [11] That is, to what extent our result could be due to chance? The description of α and β errors will be elaborated in the next part of this review series.…”

Periodontal Research: Basics and beyond - Part III (data presentation, statistical testing, interpretation and writing of a report)

“…The analysis of data requires a number of closely related operations such as establishment of categories, the application of these categories to raw data through coding, tabulation and then drawing statistical inferences. [1] Data file can take the form of a spreadsheet with individual people forming the rows of the spreadsheet, and the variables forming columns. It is important to introduce the term variable in this context.…”

“…Data can be classified as[13] (i) Quantitative data which measure either how much or how many of something, i.e ., a set of observations where any single observation is a number that represents an amount or a count and (ii) Qualitative data which provide the quality of observations, i.e., it describes something. It can be further divided into…”

“…Descriptive statistics[1] include the numbers, tables, charts, and graphs used to describe, organize, summarize, and present raw data. They are routinely used in reports which contain a significant amount of qualitative or quantitative data.…”

“…Hence, for experiments conducted with a smaller sample size, it is preferable to provide Mean ± SE. [1]…”