Am J Psychiatry 1986; 143:1118-1125
Copyright © 1986 by American Psychiatric Association
Spectrum and frequency of use of statistical techniques in psychiatric journals
JA Hokanson, SG Bryant, R Gardner Jr, DJ Luttman, BG Guernsey and AC Bienkowski
Educators in psychiatry face an important challenge in deciding what
quantitative skills to teach and where in the educational agenda to teach
them. One strategy is to focus the quantitative training of psychiatrists
on techniques they need to be effective consumers of their literature. The
authors catalogued the statistical methods described in 15 major
psychiatric journals during 1983 and 1984. A dozen procedures, typically
encountered in intermediate-level statistics courses, accounted for
approximately 95% of all the statistical methods reported. Readers of
psychiatric journals also routinely encounter multivariate, nonparametric,
and categorization techniques. Educators might apply these results in
designing exposure to statistical skills for future psychiatrists.
