ABSTRACT
An in-depth knowledge of statistics is not needed for you to be able to read a paper and decide if you think it is any good. However, to be able to justify your opinion and to be sure that you are not rejecting or accepting the paper’s conclusions incorrectly, a basic grounding in general statistics is needed and, over the next three chapters, we endeavour to give you that. In some cases we expand beyond what we feel is core, which will be covered in ‘Nerd’s Corner’ rather than in the main text. This information will add to your understanding of the subject as a whole and so is valuable, but do not worry if you struggle with it or do not want to commit it to memory. If you do not feel up to ‘Nerd’s Corner’ at all, you are quite welcome to move on to the next part in the main text. In this chapter we cover three main concepts: types of data, ways to describe the data including types of distribution and measures of spread, and using sample data to make inferences about whole populations.
