3. Application of Inferential Statistics in Pharmacy
With inferential statistics, conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone are trying to be reached. For instance, inferential statistics are used to try to infer from the sample data what the population might think. Or, inferential statistics are also used to make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study. Thus, inferential statistics are used to make inferences from the data to more general conditions.
Most of the major inferential statistics come from a general family of statistical models known as the General Linear Model. This includes the t-test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), regression analysis, and many of the multivariate …show more content…
A hypothesis is determined true or false by experiment. First of all, two hypotheses need to be formulated. Then an experiment is conducted, which then ends up accepting one or the other.
Example
There is a hypothesis that community pharmacists can improve patient adherence by phoning up the patient a week after they receive the prescription and giving advice. This is known as the alternative hypothesis (H1). There must have a different hypothesis to test it against, and this is called the null hypothesis (H0; null = zero). The null hypothesis is that the new service has no effect on adherence.
This experiment would consist of taking a representative sample of pharmacies and randomly allocating the service to half of them. The adherence of patients, two weeks after receiving their prescription is then assessed. An appropriate statistical test would then be chosen to test which of the hypotheses appears to be
With inferential statistics, conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone are trying to be reached. For instance, inferential statistics are used to try to infer from the sample data what the population might think. Or, inferential statistics are also used to make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study. Thus, inferential statistics are used to make inferences from the data to more general conditions.
Most of the major inferential statistics come from a general family of statistical models known as the General Linear Model. This includes the t-test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), regression analysis, and many of the multivariate …show more content…
A hypothesis is determined true or false by experiment. First of all, two hypotheses need to be formulated. Then an experiment is conducted, which then ends up accepting one or the other.
Example
There is a hypothesis that community pharmacists can improve patient adherence by phoning up the patient a week after they receive the prescription and giving advice. This is known as the alternative hypothesis (H1). There must have a different hypothesis to test it against, and this is called the null hypothesis (H0; null = zero). The null hypothesis is that the new service has no effect on adherence.
This experiment would consist of taking a representative sample of pharmacies and randomly allocating the service to half of them. The adherence of patients, two weeks after receiving their prescription is then assessed. An appropriate statistical test would then be chosen to test which of the hypotheses appears to be