Biostatistics: An Introduction and Conceptual Critique

Without question, biostatistical analysis has contributed to a slew of amazing medical breakthroughs. Yet it also distorts and deforms the holistic and contingent nature of health and medicine. How is it that biostatistics can both sharpen and weaken our understanding of health and medicine? What is unique about the content of health and medicine that so plainly reveals such distortions and deformities? Exploring these questions entails, first, a full survey of the tools and techniques of biostatistical analysis aiding medical breakthroughs. This survey must then be paired with a probe into the conceptual premises of these tools and techniques and how they refashion and reconstitute the inherently qualitative content of health and medicine in preparation for its quantification. We must grasp the statistical machinations at play, both technical and conceptual, that contrive to fit objects to tools rather than fitting tools to objects. This textbook introduces both the procedural methods and the hidden premises of biostatistical analysis.

About the Author

David Baronov is Professor of Sociology at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, where his current research interests include the ontology of social science methods and the quantitative/qualitative divide. Previous publications include Conceptual Foundations of Social Science Methods (2012) and The Dialectics of Inquiry across the Historical Social Sciences (2014).