Response to 'Significance of descriptive statistics in forensic anthropology research', published in the November 2013 issue of the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine

摘要

Dear Sir, The authors of a recent letter1 have pointed to the omission of descriptive statistics in a paper authored by us in early 2013. However, we are surprised that they were "astonished" by the omission, particularly since several of the "basic details" of descriptive statistics which they allude to (standard error, interquartile range, results of a normality test) are missing in a research paper on stature estimation co-authored by one of them. Now, agreed that descriptive statistics are able to provide some useful information such as the measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion of the study sample. Nevertheless, descriptive statistics perhaps take on greater importance in studies whose objective is to categorise or differentiate two groups (e.g., sex differentiation) where the mean and standard deviations of various parameters in each of the groups can prove highly valuable to researchers.