PUBH 6330 WEEK 1 ASSIGNMENT 2

In SPSS Revealed, you learned about some of the fundamental statistical tools that public health professionals use to summarize data and describe the characteristics of a population. Descriptive statistics are used to describe the shape, location, and spread of a distribution of data. Measures of central tendency—such as mean, median and mode—are used to determine the average, middle, and most common values in a data set. Measures of variability, such as standard deviation and range, are indicators of the dispersion of data. Measures of risk, such as incidence and prevalence, are used in epidemiology to calculate the proportion of the population that has a particular disease during a specified time period. In the previous course, you used SPSS to calculate many of these measures.

In this Assignment, you will compute incidence, prevalence, mean, median, and standard deviation based on data from real-world studies and evaluate statistics from Morbidity and Mortality Weekly reports (e.g., outbreaks, COVID-19).