Statistics paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Statistics paper - Essay Example ere chosen for discussion in this statistics paper from the works of Bennett (2004), Greenblatt (2002), Hiller, Knight, Rao and Simpson (2000), Makkai and Payne (2003), Niazi, Pervaiz, Minhas and Najam (2005), Wei, Makkai and McGregor (2003), and Young, Dembo and Henderson (2007). The Bennett (2004) study began in 1996 to ascertain the prevalence of drug usage among offenders in the United Kingdom, and to trace whatever links there are between drugs and crime in relation to arrestees. This study was patterned after the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program of the United States Department of Justice. Like the DUF program, the Bennett (2004) research is being carried out using interviews and drug tests as the key methodology. The following substances are being tested as part of the large-scale drug research : amphetamines (including ecstasy), benzodiazepines, cannabinoid metabolite, cocaine metabolite (including ‘crack’), LSD, methadone, opiates (including heroin) and alcohol. The Bennett (2004) research used both descriptive and inferential statistics. Measures of central tendency including the range, median, proportion, frequency, percentage were used to describe the prevalence of drug use among the arrestees. The range was used to describe the length of the interval which contains all the data. The range also indicates dispersion of the data. Arrestees who tested for cannabis, for example, ranged from 36 per cent to 58 percent across the five survey area (p. 17). The proportion states the relationship of one part of a measure compared to a whole. In this study, proportion was oftentimes used to depict the picture of the size of the populations of arrestees testing positive for any of the eight substances in the aforementioned paragraph, such as â€Å" †¦ three out of four arrestees tested positive for at least one drug (including alcohol)† (p. 18). The median in this study describes the midpoint of the range where half of the data contained in the range falls