Provided that the data show that a compound is safe, it is the primary efficacy analysis that determines whether the compound is approved. The secondary analyses support, clarify and confirm, but only one prospectively planned efficacy analysis can be primary in support of an effectiveness claim for a given trial. Why should this be so? And how can we design the trial and set up the primary eff...

Climate variability and change are risk factors for climate sensitive activities such as agriculture. Managing these risks requires “climate knowledge”, i.e. a sound understanding of causes and consequences of climate variability and knowledge of potential management options that are suitable in light of the climatic risks posed. Often such information about prognostic variables (e.g. yield, ra...

The eld of statistics can be divided into two branches, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics, as its name suggests, is concerned with describing a population, or a sample from that population, in terms of numerical measures that are computed from data. Such a numerical measure is called a statistic. If the data used in the computation comes from the whole po...

This paper provided an insight to the effective use of inferential statistics for social and behavioural research. As a theoretical paper, it explored the importance of tests of significance emphasizing the need to use the appropriate test for a particular research. It showed that a parametric test is one that involves the estimation of the value of at list one population parameter and the fact...