Knowledge and Attitude of Medical and Dental Postgraduate Students toward Practice of Biostatistics

Abstract

Purpose: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has appropriately focused attention on critical appraisal of clinical research. A result of this movement is that medical specialists must improve their grasp of epidemiological and statistical principles. This process necessitates a substantial level of expertise of the reader to appraise the design, methodology, data analysis, and interpretation of findings of relevant studies to arrive at conclusions. The foregoing requirements, together with the progressively increasing complexity of statistical methods, make information processing a complex task. This ‘gap’ between health science researchers and the understanding of mathematics and the statistical methods could justify the disinterest of a considerable part of clinical researchers and postgraduate students. Materials and methods: A cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted on all the enrolled medical and dental postgraduate students of 3 years belonging to the Sumandeep Vidyapeeth. The study subjects were distributed questionnaire that consisted of 2 parts which had questions related to the attitude and knowledge regarding the practice of biostatistics among the study subjects. Results: The level of knowledge among the postgraduates was moderate and the attitude was found to be highly positive. Significant results were obtained that showed that the knowledge and attitude toward practice of biostatistics are strongly associated with each other with correlation coefficient to be 0.82. Conclusion: The knowledge and attitude of medical and dental postgraduate students was found to be highly correlated indicating that with higher level of attitude increased knowledge can be acquired for practice of biostatistics among them. Biostatistics is perceived as an important element of EBM and incorporating it into EBM practice and curriculum would pave new ways into research field.