Summary
Healthcare professionals perform activities intended to prevent, assess, diagnose, and treat diseases and disorders. By doing so, they handle more statistics, and the knowledge of descriptive statistics helps analyze, interpret, and understand such data. The knowledge of statistical methods and concepts assists in making informed decisions, especially when assessing external evidence needed for preventing and treating speech-associated disorders (Portney, 2020). Descriptive statistics describe and summarize important features regarding speech treatment data, as noted by Portney (2020). The most commonly used descriptive measures include but are not limited to mean, standard deviation and maximum & minimum values.
Determination of Mean, Mode, Median, Variance, and Standard Deviation
The data I will employ from the previous SLP is the amount of water I drank while on my trip. The mean is computed by adding all the numbers and dividing the sum by the total number of numbers in this specific data set, which is 5[(48+48+48+64+64)/5]. The average score is 54.4. My statistics show a median of 48, known as the center point. The mode of a data set is the number that appears most often within that set, which is 48 in this case. To compute the variance, I must first use every integer in my set and then subtract the set’s mean. The mean is 54.4. 48-54.4=6.4 and 64-54.4=9.6 The sum of the squares of the values from the mean is 307.2. Dividing this sum by N=5 gives a variance of 61.44. The square root of the variance, 7.838, gives the standard deviation.
Measures of Central Tendency that Accurately Describes the Variable
The central tendency of a data set refers to the center values or numbers. Mean, median, and mode are the three calculable measurements of central tendency. The mean is the most used measure of central tendency. There are a few outliers within the total ounces of water I drank, but they have minimal impact on the mean or standard deviation. The average amount of water in ounces remained the same. Since the mean represents the average in this data set, the data set fairly remains unaltered, making the mean the best measure of the central tendency.
Spread of the Distribution
Data spread detail the fluctuation of data ranges from the central data. My statistics reveal a large spread of data sets. The mean and median are close to the central tendency. As a statistical metric, the standard deviation may be used to assess how far the values in a set of data depart from the mean. The standard deviation, 7.838, from my data set to reveals how much water I drink daily and if it is close to the recommended levels or my healthy target. Here, the variance, 61.44 is higher than the mean. In case the standard deviation and the variance are lower than the mean, then the data set numbers and the spread are close together.
Scholarly Source
In an article published by Liska et al. (2019) on the general health outcomes of hydration in the population, hydration was noted to be essential to life, although given less attention. Proper hydration was found to be essential for optimal neurological function, composition, and body, weight, renal and gastrointestinal functions. The article concluded that hydration is the key to proper health.
Understanding statistical methods, especially descriptive statistics, help healthcare providers make valuable health-issue decisions. Ideally, for this case, mean, mode, and median are vital measures that have facilitated the spread of the distribution in water consumption.
References List
Liska, D., Mah, E., Brisbois, T., Barrios, P. L., Baker, L. B., & Spriet, L. L. (2019). Narrative Review of Hydration and Selected Health Outcomes in the General Population. Nutrients, 11(1), 70.