Hello all, would you be able to recommend me any documents/websites where I can find definition of various stat terminology the MCAT wants us to know? Terms like longitudian studies, p value, cohort studies and all these good stuff. Thanks in advance.
Hi
@holdmystethoscope ! A cohort study in my world (the medical world) is typically based on a group of people who share the same event (age cohort, gender cohort, marriage cohort....) and are followed longitudinally. We can also do clinical cohort studies, for example all people who receive a kidney transplant are followed over time. A longitudinal study can be a cohort study but it may follow people who are selected for other reasons, especially if they are representative of a population at a given time). This language is often confused in lay literature....and is wrong. Both designs include following people longitudinally ---- the difference is how they are initially selected.
In Cohort studies, subjects are selected on the basis of some common experience (such as attending medical school) and are then monitored for a specified amount of time at regular intervals (taking Step 1, 2, and 3) until they develop the outcome of interest (they become residents) or the follow up time ends. The cohort study minimizes many of the biases evident in case-control designs and is the definitive observational clinical study. Cohort allows us to compute a relative risk.
Longitudinal Studies identify individual subjects and follow them over a given period of time. For example, the study of statins on cardiovascular events requires that the same subject is observed over a significant period of time.
I like to think of cohort studies as a subset of longitudinal studies.
Statistics and study design are two separate subjects, though they are related. For statistics you want to avoid going too deep into non-MCAT math so I find
THIS SITE a good resource for my students.
for study design, you can use
THIS SITE as a good bases. many of you MCAT content books, including
NextStep's books, have a section devoted to math and statistics on the MCAT, so if you have not already, pick up a set. The Khan academy also has a decent, if not great or comprehensive, videos on basic statistics
HERE.
hope this helps, good luck!!
