ATTITUDE OF TEACHING FACULTY TOWARDS STATISTICS AT A MEDICAL UNIVERSITY IN KARACHI, PAKISTAN

Authors

  • Nazeer Khan
  • Yasmin Mumtaz

Abstract

Background: Statistics is mainly used in biological research to verify the clinicians and researchersfindings and feelings, and gives scientific validity for their inferences. In Pakistan, the educationalcurriculum is developed in such a way that the students who are interested in entering in the field ofbiological sciences do not study mathematics after grade 10. Therefore, due to their fragile backgroundof mathematical skills, the Pakistani medical professionals feel that they do not have adequate base tounderstand the basic concepts of statistical techniques when they try to use it in their research or read ascientific article. The aim of the study was to assess the attitude of medical faculty towards statistics.Methods: A questionnaire containing 42 close-ended and 4 open-ended questions, related to theattitude and knowledge of statistics, was distributed among the teaching faculty of Dow University ofHealth Sciences (DUHS). One hundred and sixty-seven filled questionnaires were returned from 374faculty members (response rate 44.7%). Results: Forty-three percent of the respondents claimed thatthey had ‘introductive’ level of statistics courses, 63% of the respondents strongly agreed that a goodresearcher must have some training in statistics, 82% of the faculty was in favour (strongly agreed oragreed) that statistics was really useful for research. Only 17% correctly stated that statistics is thescience of uncertainty. Half of the respondents accepted that they have problem of writing the statisticalsection of the article. 64% of the subjects indicated that statistical teaching methods were the mainreasons for the impression of its difficulties. 53% of the faculty indicated that the co-authorship of thestatistician should depend upon his/her contribution in the study. Gender did not show any significantdifference among the responses. However, senior faculty showed higher level of the importance for theuse of statistics and difficulties of writing result section of articles as compared to junior faculty.Conclusion: The study showed a low level of knowledge, but high level of the awareness for the use ofstatistical techniques in research and exhibited a good level of motivation for further training.Keywords: Attitude, statistics, knowledge of medical faculty, knowledge about SPSS.

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Published

2009-09-01

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 3 (2009): JOURNAL OF AYUB MEDICAL COLLEGE, ABBOTTABAD

Section

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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