Generating New Data: Census Taking and Sampling

by Heinz Kohler

The academic discipline of Statistics is a branch of mathematics that develops and uses techniques for the careful collection, effective presentation, and proper analysis of numerical information. These techniques can be applied to find answers to questions that arise in all areas of human endeavor. Medical researchers use them to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs, devices and procedures or to appraise the effects of lifestyle changes; nutritionists use them to investigate health claims associated with foods or dietary supplements; business executives use them to assess the results of marketing campaigns or the effect of new methods of production on product quality. Economists use them to forecast the business cycle; politicians to predict the outcome of future elections. Spies use them decipher coded messages. The list goes on. No wonder that Statistics has been called a universal guide to the unknown. Consider your own health, just one among millions of topics that Statistics could address. Every day we meet new health-related stories ̶ about prescription and over-the-counter drugs, medical devices and procedures, the lifestyle we should adopt, foods we should favor, and dietary supplements that would surely add years to our lives. Rightly, we dismiss many of these stories as pure snake oil. Mayonnaise prevents Alzheimer’s? Chelation therapy blasts away arterial plaque? Food coloring lowers bad cholesterol? Cinnamon clobbers diabetes? Grapefruit erases breast cancer? Watermelon slashes prostate cancer? Come on! But what about more serious-sounding claims? True enough, reports about ACE inhibitors and beta blockers, Advil and Motrin, 64-slice CT scans and PSA tests, drug-coated stents and the DASH diet appear to be far removed from snake oil, but false claims about any of these may well occur, which makes them snake oil no less than those absurd and fantastic claims about mayonnaise and Alzheimer’s. Or consider how glowing press releases of one time, even by renowned medical journals or the Food and Drug Administration, are often followed by conflicting stories at a later time, which makes us Will fancy cholesterol drugs save us from heart attacks or will they destroy our liver? Is the once-a-day baby aspirin the “cure of the century” or a stroke-causing hoax? Will Avandia fight our diabetes or give us a heart attack? A knowledge of Statistics offers a If we care to separate bogus claims from the real thing, we must adopt the special way of statistical thinking that is routinely employed by the best of those who undertake the scientific studies that alone can generate medical knowledge we can trust. Learning Statistics, therefore, is well worth it, but it is not easy. The field is so vast that no single book can reasonably cover all of it. Nor can it anticipate which topics will be of interest to any given person or group of them. This author, therefore, has divided the field into 24 sections that are made available as separate electronic books from which prospective students and teachers can select the subset that is most useful to them. This fourth book of the series shows how new data can be generated by census taking or sampling. Along the way, you learn 1. appreciate numerous reasons for taking samples rather than conducting censuses, 2. distinguish useless nonprobability samples from valuable probability samples, 3. take your own simple random samples with a random numbers table or a computer's random-numbers generator, 4. create other types of random samples, including systematic, stratified, and clustered samples, 5. recognize the sources of random error and systematic error in survey data, 6.

233 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 4, 2017

About the author

HEINZ KOHLER was born in Berlin, Germany, where he grew up before and during World War II. By the war's end, he found himself in rural East Germany and spent years watching the Nazi tyranny give way to a Communist one. He made it to West Berlin before the Wall went up and came to the United States in the late 1950s. Since 1961, he was associated with Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he became the Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics, taught Economics as well as Statistics and published numerous textbooks on both subjects. His most recent books include the series SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET, Book 1: Extraordinary Birds, Book 2: Brainteasers, Book 3: Unusual Plants, Book 4: Remarkable Animals, Book 5: Wonders of the World, Book 6: The World's Greatest Inventions, Book 7: Exploring Northern Europe, Book 8: Exploring Western Europe, Book 9: Exploring Southwestern Europe, Book 10: Exploring Central Europe, Book 11: Exploring Africa, Book 12: Exploring Southeastern Europe, Book 13: Exploring Russia and Central Asia, Book 14: Exploring Western Asia, Book 15: Exploring Southern Asia, Book 16: Exploring Eastern Asia, Book 17: Exploring Australia and Oceania, Book 18: Exploring North America, and Book 19: exploring Central America--all of which introduce the Internet equivalent of the late 1800s, CAUTION: SNAKE OIL! which shows how statistical thinking can help us expose misinformation about our health, and MY NAME WAS FIVE, a memoir of World War II.