Companion to the Nursing Ph.D. & DNP Statistics Curricula

A set of explanations, lectures, resources, and activities to complement the statistics curriculum that is part of Hunter College’s Ph.D. Program in Nursing Research and Health Equity and DNP Program.
Author
Affiliation

Wm. Ellery Samuels, Ph.D.

Published

September 25, 2025

Preface

This “book” is a companion to the statistics courses offered as part of the Ph.D. in Nursing Research program at Hunter College, CUNY. It also provides supplemental materials for Hunter’s Doctor of Nursing Practice program.

Very much a work in progress—and anyway intended to be in addition to and not instead of the many resources elsewhere—this companion currently contains:

  • Lectures and essays on topics covered in the applied statistics curriculum:
    • NURS 60N lectures & materials (Chap. 1)
    • NURS 915 & 916 lectures & materials (Chap. 2)
    • A hands-on guide to writing Results sections (Chap. 3)
    • Discussions and activities expand upon the statistical concepts of significance (Chap. 4), correlations & partial/semipartial correlations (Chap. 5), effect size (Chap. 6), missing data (Chap. 7), and model building (Chaps. 810)
  • Lectures and essays on topics covered in the introduction to psychometrics course, NURS 925 (Chaps. 11 & 12)
  • Step-by-step guides to using various stat-related software (Chaps. 1317)
  • Tables of common statistical abbreviations and terms along with their meanings (Apps. A & B)
  • A small collection of decision trees (flowcharts) to decide which analysis to conduct (App. C)

Colophon

This companion is created 2022 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike license. (Note that the “Published” date given above is in fact the date of the most-recent revisions.)

Light-themed HTML-version typefaces are Bona Nova for text, Ubuntu Mono for code blocks, and Latin Modern Math for formulas. The dark HTML is theme is unmodified solar, which is based on Ethan Schoonover’s eye-friendly Solarized dark theme.

PDF-version typefaces are TeX Gyre Bonum for both text & formulas and TeX Gyre Adventor for code blocks.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been occasionally used for clarity and content review—and extensively to debug code errors and issues (I’m looking at you, Quarto).

This Companion is produced through Bookdown in the RStudio environment with:

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