Can Anyone Make Sense of This?

[qwopty99]

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Trying to make sense of the abstract found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...ez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

 

[armstrong77]

The randomly selected subjects, aged 76 years of age and older, were found to be on average +1.33 D hypermetropic and the average cylinder power was 0.82 D.

The mean refractive error was found to be +1.5 D with 0.5 negative cylinder at between 85 and 90 degrees.

😕😕

 

[swiftiii]

well, average and mean aren't the same thing.... Besides, the paper is 20 years old. Not exactly relevant data. 🙂

 

[armstrong77]

Average and mean are often denoted to mean the same thing.

 

[KHE]

well, average and mean aren't the same thing.... Besides, the paper is 20 years old. Not exactly relevant data. 🙂

Has anything occurred in the last 20 years that would make it more likely than not that the average refractive error in a population over the age of 76 has changed?

 

[qwopty99]

well, average and mean aren't the same thing.... Besides, the paper is 20 years old. Not exactly relevant data. 🙂

When I took stats, I "learned" that a mean is an average, but that an average isn't necessarily the mean.

Average, can be one of: mean, mode, median. (but most usually, the mean)


Anyhoos - I'd like to understand this abstract as part of a literature review I have to do. This abstract still does not make sense to me (would help if I could get a copy of the actual paper, but I can't).

 

[swiftiii]

Oof, stirred up a hornets nest...surprise....

I was just trying to help. I know most people think that mean and average mean the same thing, but they don't. Without being able to read the entire article I couldn't help out any more than giving out that fact.

And as far as relevant data, yeah, many things have changed in the last 20 years. At least, I am pretty sure....

Qwopty, the only thing that came to mind is that perhaps they were talking about the mean values around that axis. That is, if they were implying that mean and average were the same thing.

But this is just a guess. They were probably sticking to the rules that statisticians do, and I'm not enough of a stat geek to remember the difference the two (average and mean). I just know with certainty that I was taught by stat professors that "commoners" often confuse the two. This is probably where the discrepancy lies.