Open any applied statistical textbook and you will be confronted by data. Tables of results extracted from published papers to demonstrate statistical methods. This is where statisticians learn the trade of data analysis. The trouble is, the data are clean and processed. Often the context in which they were gathered is lost. All one might be told is "A doctor did a survey and got the following results". The variables will be carefully selected and the data set will be quite small. All the angst of wondering whether is a much bigger task than data analysis. Contract research organisations employ anything up to five times more data managers than they do statisticians. The Association for Clinical Data Management is, I believe, bigger than the Royal Statistical Society.
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