Spectrum and frequency of use of statistical techniques in psychiatric journals.

Educators in psychiatry face an important challenge in deciding what quantitative skills to teach and where in the educational agenda to teach them. One strategy is to focus the quantitative training of psychiatrists on techniques they need to be effective consumers of their literature. The authors catalogued the statistical methods described in 15 major psychiatric journals during 1983 and 1984. A dozen procedures, typically encountered in intermediate-level statistics courses, accounted for approximately 95% of all the statistical methods reported. Readers of psychiatric journals also routinely encounter multivariate, nonparametric, and categorization techniques. Educators might apply these results in designing exposure to statistical skills for future psychiatrists.