Читать книгу Practical Statistics for Nursing and Health Care - Jim Fowler - Страница 12

A health care investigation is typically a five‐stage process: identifying objectives; planning; data collection; analysis; and, finally, reporting. The methodologies frequently used are sample surveys, clinical trials and epidemiological studies. These are the subject of this and subsequent chapters. However, we must first be clear about the definitions of some basic terms. Many of the terms used in statistics are used in daily life, where their meanings might be quite different. The word ‘population’ may conjure images of ‘people’, while ‘sample’ might mean a ‘free sample’ of cream offered by a pharmaceutical company, or a ‘sample’ requested by a doctor for urine analysis. In statistics, however, these words have much more precise meanings.