title: Can't miss: conquer any number task by making important statistics simple. Part 5. Comparing two confidence intervals, standard error of the difference between two means and between two proportions.
abstract: Healthcare quality professionals need to understand and use inferential statistics to interpret sample data from their organizations. Since in quality improvement and healthcare research studies all the data from a population often are not available, investigators take samples and make inferences about that population using inferential statistics. This series of six articles will give readers an understanding of the concepts of inferential statistics as well as the specific tools for calculating confidence intervals and tests of statistical significance for samples of data. This article, Part 5, demonstrates the comparison of two confidence intervals as a method for estimating the difference between two population means. The concept of the standard error of the difference between two sample means is presented along with the confidence interval for estimating the difference between two population means. The article concludes with the standard error and confidence interval for estimating the difference between two population proportions from a binomial variable.
authors.affiliation: Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, Madison, USA. john_hansen@ghc-hmo.com
authors.forename: John P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Hansen
mesh_terms: D016001:Confidence Intervals; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014481:United States