Principles of Statistics: What the Sports Medicine Professional Needs to Know

Abstract

Understanding the results and statistics reported in original research remains a large challenge for many sports medicine practitioners and, in turn, may be among one of the biggest barriers to integrating research into sports medicine practice. The purpose of this article is to provide minimal essentials a sports medicine practitioner needs to know about interpreting statistics and research results to facilitate the incorporation of the latest evidence into practice. Topics covered include the difference between statistical significance and clinical meaningfulness; effect sizes and confidence intervals; reliability statistics, including the minimal detectable difference and minimal important difference; and statistical power.

Keywords: Clinical meaningfulness; Confidence intervals; Data interpretation; Effect sizes; Minimal detectable difference; Minimal important difference; P values; Statistical power.