A Practical Guide to Statistical Tests in the Biomedical Field: From Parametric to Nonparametric, Where and How?

Abstract

Healthcare decisions are based on scientific evidence obtained from medical studies by gathering data and analyzing it to obtain the best results. When analyzing data, biostatistics is a powerful tool, but healthcare professionals lack knowledge in this field. This lack of knowledge can manifest itself in situations such as choosing the wrong statistical test for the right situation or applying a statistical test without checking its assumptions, leading to inaccurate results and misleading conclusions. With the help of this “narrative review”, the aim is to bring biostatistics closer to healthcare professionals by answering certain questions: how to describe the distribution of data? how to assess the normality of data? how to transform data? and how to choose between nonparametric and parametric tests? Through this work, our hope is that the reader will be able to choose the right test for the right situation, in order to obtain the most accurate results.