INTRODUCTION TO PROBABILITY THEORY AND HEALTH STATISTICS

Your specific assignment for this week is to select one type of quantitative health datum to collect from your own life. Some examples of data to collect could be:

1. How many minutes do you spend exercising each day? 90 min
2. What is your total daily caloric intake in calories? 1200
3. What is your resting heart rate in beats per minute? 80 beats per min
4. How many ounces of water do you drink each day? 96 ounces
5. What is your estimated total caloric expenditure from exercise each day?500
6. What is your estimated daily intake of saturated fat in grams? 4g
7. What is your daily systolic/diastolic blood pressure? 110/80

Your Task:

1. Choose one variable that varies measurably from day to day. Be sure to specify the units of measurement, and state how it will be gathered.
2. Then collect at least 5 days worth of data on that one variable. For example, if your variable is how many minutes you spend exercising each day, simply record the number of minutes that you spend exercising each day during the sampling period. Be sure to save this data for use in remaining SLP assignments. The more data points that you gather during the session, the better.
3. Describe the data you have collected and its importance in relations to individual/population’s health.

Submit your (1-2 pages) paper

Required Reading and Resources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. (2012). Lesson 4: Displaying public health data. In Principles of epidemiology in public health practice [3rd ed.]. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/ophss/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson4/index…

Cook, A., Netuveli, G., & Sheikh, A. (2004). Chapter 1: Laying the foundations: Measurements and probability. In Basic skills in statistics: A guide for healthcare professionals (pp. 3-14). London, GBR: Class Publishing. eISBN: 9781859591291.

Statistics Learning Centre. (2011, December 13). Types of data: Nominal, ordinal, interval/ratio. Retrieved from

Norman, G. R., & Streiner, D. L. (2014). Section the first: The nature of data and statistics: Chapter 1: The basics. In Biostatistics: The bare essentials [4th ed., e-Book]. Shelton, Connecticut: PMPH-USA, Ltd. eISBN-13: 978-1-60795-279-4. Available in the Trident Online Library EBSCO eBook Collection.

Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce. (2016, August 9). Health data tools and statistics. Retrieved from https://phpartners.org/health_stats.html

Additional Reading and Resources (Optional)

Allee, N., Alpi, K., Cogdill, K. W., Selden, C., & Youngkin, M. (2004). Public health information and data: A training manual. Retrieved from http://www.phpartners.org/pdf/phmanual.pdf

Ash, R. (1970). Chapter 1: Basic concepts. In Basic probability theory (pp. 1-45). Dover Publications: Mineola, NY. Retrieved from http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~r-ash/BPT/BPT.pdf

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. (2012). Lesson 4: Displaying public health data. In Principles of epidemiology in public health practice [3rd ed.]. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/ophss/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson4/index…

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. (2012). Data and statistics. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/DataStatistics/

Khan Academy. (2012). Statistics: The average. Retrieved from http://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics/v/stati…

McGraw Hill Education. (2016). Chapter 1: What is statistics? (pp. 1-30). Retrieved from http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0070…

OnlineStatBook. (2011). Introduction to statistics: Levels of measurement . Retrieved from

Perdisco.tv. (2008, December 19). Introductory statistics – Chapter 1: Introduction . Retrieved from

Stattrek. (2016). Probability distributions: Discrete vs. continuous. Retrieved from http://stattrek.com/probability-distributions/disc…

Watt, J. H., & Van den Berg, S. (2002). Part 2: Basic tools of research. Chapter 9: Distributions, population, sample, and sampling distributions. In Research methods for communication science. Communication Institute for Online Scholarship