Chapter 1 Introduction
You may wonder why you will need to learn some statistics as you do not plan to compute statistics yourself in your future job. But, as a public health professional, the decisions you may be brought to make based on data will be too important to delegate. You will want to be able to interpret the data that surrounds you and to come to your own conclusions (Sharpe, De Veaux, and Velleman 2012).
At the end, I hope you will understand the importance of statistics in our complex world and even enjoy studying the discipline.
1.1 Lecture Tips
When you see a term written like statistics in the text it is a concept that you must understand the definition and the usage. A proper definition will often be highlighted in a box. No need to know the definition by heart.
Different boxes will highlight the concepts, warnings and small practical exercises.
The first learning objective is to relax and trust yourself on your capacities to enjoy the biostat class.
This will be the definition of a concept you should understand along with its usage
This is a warning
This is a small question you should try to answer
This little book is being developed as a support for my online classroom in the context of the SARS-Cov2 pandemic. The content is a mix of my usual slides with definitions and examples from the books by Sharpe, De Veaux, and Velleman (2012) (second edition), by Diez, Barr, and Çetinkaya-Rundel (2019) (fourth edition), and by Ancelle (2017, in French).
To illustrate the different concepts, I mostly use a sample of the 2006 French Health Behavior School-aged Children database (HBSC). Since 1982 HBSC has been a pioneer cross-national study gaining insight into young people’s well-being, health behaviors and their social context. This research collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe is conducted every four years in 50 countries and regions across Europe and North America. For more details please visit the HBSC website (Aarø et al. 1986)
The statistical software R is used to illustrate some of the statistical tests and modeling methods (R Core Team 2020). Commands and output examples are presented. R and the bookdown package were in fact used to create this little e-book (Xie 2016).