Biostatistics for the Health Sciences | 
 enlarge | Authors: R. Clifford Blair, Richard Taylor
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Category: Book
List Price: $123.20
Buy New: $85.00
You Save: $38.20 (31%)
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 152008
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 552
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 8.1 x 1
ISBN: 0131176609
Dewey Decimal Number: 570.15195
EAN: 9780131176607
Publication Date: January 14, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This book provides a solid foundation in introductory biostatistics with up-to-date methods, lucid explanations, and a modern approach. Explains commonly used biostatistical methods, such as odds and risk ratios, and Fisher's exact test, in a clear and thorough manner. Introduces equivalence testing in a variety of research settings. Presents nonparametric methods in a modern light, couched in the broader context of permutation-based methods. Provides real-world data with case studies consisting of synopses of published research. Provides step-by-step solutions to exercises, along with pertinent equations used in obtaining the solution and page numbers of relevant discussions. For health science students and professionals who need to increase their understanding of biostatistics.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Clear June 10, 2007
Stephen Williamson (Little Rock, AR United States)
I am not good at statistics, but I find this text to be clear, even for me. It has also served well as a reference.
 Good Textbook, With Some Reservations July 21, 2007
Jason L. Simms (Tampa, FL)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have used other biostatistics texts before, and this is indeed one of the better ones. Generally, the explanations are clear and easy to follow, but not always. Sometimes, the author will go into far too much detail and risks losing all but the most capable students under a mountain of excessive information for an intro textbook.
Other times, the example calculations will not match up with the instructions given. For example, when doing a two-tailed test and testing for significance, you can either double the obtained p-value OR halve the critical p-value. In some cases, the author will explain a given test and discuss halving the critical p-value, but then in example calculations will double the obtained p-value without comment. This is a small example, but this type of thing happens all the time.
The appendices are excellent. For instance, the author provides both "sides" of the area under the normal curve (Z-scores and p-values) for a given half, whereas most authors require you to solve .5-n to get the other part. Again, this sounds minor, but it is a help and a timesaver. I also like how all the equations are set off in boxes, and the author does a fine job of immediately explaining what variables are what.
All in all, I like this book. I wish it left out some amount of what I consider to be excessive detail, and I also wish that all the example calculations were consistent with the instructions given. But otherwise, great book!
 Am I really the only one writing a poor review??? November 15, 2007
R. Stolz (New Orleans, LA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have to confess to being a bit surprised in the fact that I am the only one to, up until this point, write a negative review of this book. I am currently a graduate student in a biostatistics program at Tulane University and I think that my first semester biostats instructor summed up this book best in her stating that "I think it is clear that this book was not written by statisticians."
This book provides a number of misrepresentations of statistics and rarely provides enough information to be useful. If you give any importance to mathematical rigor this is not the book for you (I am a biostats student, not a math student, my threshold for mathematical rigor is relatively low).
If you would like to understand this subject I highly recommend your buying the book by Rosner. Rosner's book IS significantly more difficult than Blair and Taylor, but it also provides the information needed to gain any practical knowledge of the subject matter.
That said, if your hope is to breeze through a biostatistics course as to complete your MPH and you place fairly little importance on the concepts of this class (i.e. if you are taking a biostats course because you HAVE to) this is probably a good text choice.
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