Current Consepts A Statistics Primer Statistical Tests for Discrete Data

When reviewing articles in the literature, it is important to spend some time thinking specifically about the data presented. The data collected in an experiment may be classified into two general types. Continuous data repre-sent data that vary over a continuous range and may be displayed on a curve, frequently a bell-shaped curve. Some examples of continuous data include height, age, and the times recorded in a mile race. Discrete data, on the other hand, are data that fall into specific categories. Examples of this type of data include gender, the presence or absence of a specific condition, and the classification of a patient’s results into groups such as poor, fair, good, and excellent. Statistics provides different tests for analyzing these dif-ferent types of data. In this review some of the commonly used tests for analyzing discrete data will be presented