Welcome to the first quarter of Statistical Reasoning in Public Health, the first installment in a two quarter series. The full series will give the student the skills to objectively evaluate public health research in terms of its statistical content, to contribute to the methods and results sections for completed research publications, and to contribute to the statistical aspects of grant preparation. Some of the major topics covered in this course include data summarization and presentation, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, study design, multiple linear regression, multiple logistic regression, and survival analysis techniques including proportional hazards regression.

In the first part of the course, we will concentrate our efforts on the following topics:

• Data Summarization and Presentation — measuring central tendency and variability in continuous data, histograms, estimating proportions for dichotomous data, and constructing survival curve estimates for survival (time to event) data
• Confidence Intervals — constructing confidence intervals for a population mean, a difference in means between two populations, a population proportion, and a difference in proportions between two populations
• Statistical Hypothesis Testing — the paired t-test, the two sample t-test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Fisher's Exact Test, the Chi-Squared Test, and the log-rank test

The emphasis in this course is on concepts, as opposed to computation. However, there will be some formulae and computing using the statistical package Stata.

• "No one can say that Biostats is not a wonderful subject after taking this class and listening to this lecture. I highly recommend the class to everybody..."
• "This is an excellent and practical review of the use of statistics in a setting related to our work activities..."
• "This was a very informative course presented in a very simple language which made it easy for me to understand. The presentation was very logical and simplified and hence it made a great course."

John McGready, Course Instructor

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