Why “Statistics in Psychiatry”? What makes statistics in psychiatry a particularly interesting intellectual challenge? Why is it not merely a sub-discipline of medical statisticssuch as the application of statistics in rheumatology or statistics in cardiology? It is in the nature of mental illness and of mental health. Mental illness extends beyond medicine into the realms of the social and behavioral sciences. Similarly, statistics in psychiatry owes as much, or more, to developments in social and behavioral statistics as it does to medical statistics. Statisticians in this area typically user a much wider variety of multivariate statistical methods than do medical statisticians elsewhere. Scientific psychiatry has always taken the problems of measurement much more seriously than appears to be the case in other clinical specialties. This is partly due to the fact that the measurement problems in psychiatry are obviously rather complex, but partly also because the other clinical...
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References and Further Reading
Dunn G (2000) Statistics in psychiatry. Arnold, London
Moran PAP (1969) Statistical methods in psychiatric research (with discussion). J Roy Stat Soc A 132:484–525
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Dunn, G. (2011). Psychiatry, Statistics in. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_91
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