Branches
Biostatistics
BAHY-oh-stuh-TIS-tiks
Also Known As Biometry
Population Health Field
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Biostatistics is the branch of public health that applies statistical methods to biological and health data: designing clinical trials and population surveys, building the disease-surveillance and life-table methods epidemiology depends on, and testing whether a pattern seen in health data reflects a real effect rather than chance. It is counted, alongside epidemiology, environmental health, health policy and management, and the social and behavioral sciences, among the traditional core disciplines of public health, and its methods, drawn originally from work on heredity and agricultural experiments by figures such as Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher, now underpin the quantitative reasoning the whole field of public health uses to move from raw counts to a defensible finding.
Facts
Central QuestionSourced to the subject's own accountGiven the numbers a health study or a surveillance system produces, how much of the pattern they show reflects a real effect in the population, and how much reflects chance, bias or confounding in how the data were gathered and sampled? 1 Key DebateSourced to the subject's own accountThe field's own central tool is itself under sustained challenge: renewed by a replication crisis across biomedical research and psychology, in which a substantial share of published statistically-significant findings failed to reproduce, the American Statistical Association warned in 2016 that treating a p-value at or below 0.05 as license to claim a scientific finding distorts the scientific process, a 2017 proposal by 72 authors argued for tightening the conventional significance threshold from 0.05 to 0.005, and by 2019 over 800 statisticians and scientists had signed a call to abandon the term statistical significance altogether; some journals have gone further and banned significance testing from their pages outright. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Both are counted among public health's traditional core disciplines; biostatistics supplies the quantitative methods epidemiology's population measures depend on.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Biostatistics
WikipediaLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Biostatistics (sometimes referred to as biometry)
1. Wikipedia: Biostatistics
WikipediaBiostatistics and genetics sectionQuote, Biostatistics and genetics section
Ronald Fisher worked alongside statistician Betty Allan developing several basic statistical methods in support of his work studying the crop experiments at Rothamsted Research
1. Wikipedia: Biostatistics
WikipediaApplications, Public health sectionQuote, Applications, Public health section
epidemiology, health services research, nutrition, environmental health and health care policy & management
2. Wikipedia: Statistical Significance
WikipediaLimitations and Challenges sectionsQuote, Limitations and Challenges sections
the widespread use of "statistical significance" (generally interpreted as "p ≤ 0.05") as a license for making a claim of a scientific finding (or implied truth) leads to considerable distortion of the scientific process
2. Wikipedia: Statistical Significance
WikipediaChallenges: Redefining Significance sectionQuote, Challenges: Redefining Significance section
In 2019, over 800 statisticians and scientists signed a message calling for the abandonment of the term "statistical significance" in science.
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