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Mar 17, 2014 · Assuming a statistical norm is "the right way to be" makes the lives of many people more difficult. The myth of normal tells us that that being within the range of what is...
Oct 11, 2023 · A bell-shaped curve, also known as a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution, is a symmetrical probability distribution in statistics. It represents a graph where the data clusters around the mean, with the highest frequency in the center, and decreases gradually towards the tails.
- Statistical Norm
- Normality and Biological Function
- Arguments Against Normality as Biological Function
- Normality as Convention
- Normality as An Instrument of Power and Control
- Normality and Disease
- Obesity
- Normality and The Individual
- Normality and Health-Care Ethics
- Can Medicine Dispense with The Concept of The Normal?
The statistical concept of normality, although it is well established in modern discourse, has had a relatively short history. According to Hacking (1990) and to Lennard Davis, it appeared around 1830, alongside the development of the discipline of statistics itself. A major reason for the emergence of statistics at that time was the perceived need...
When King, as noted above, suggested that the word normal is misused, he said that the statistical average may be, and very often is, abnormal. The use of normal in the sense of the statistical sense was incorrect: “normal …is objectively, and properly, to be defined as that which functions in accordance with its design” (King 1945, p. 494). He als...
There are, however, several problems in understanding normality in terms of biological function. There is, first, the fact of considerable variation in animal and human populations. Indeed, in the biological sciences, particularly in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project, the scientific concept of interest is variation rather than normality: re...
In arguing against functional determinism, Amundson supports the view that social judgments construct ideas about what is normal. Turning to explicit examination of the view that normality is a social convention, there are again, at least two aspects to the claim that normality is a convention. It is possible to identify a “thin” account which simp...
The idea that there is a boundary around what social organization and norms permithints at the thicker view that the norm is an instrument of power. The ways in which norms become controlling vary in the extent to which they restrict the freedoms of those to whom they are applied. Historically, one of the most obvious freedom-limiting uses has been...
Just as debates about the normal are associated with notions of disability, they are also implicated in concepts of health and disease. Jiri Vácha notes the association between the frequent and the normal and beyond that, the healthy (Vácha 1978). But the dichotomies of health/illness are also notoriously controversial. In the context of illness an...
The example of obesity demonstrates some of the difficulties of definition, the potential for control at a public health level, and the relationship between the statistical norm and “healthy.” At the time of writing, there is what has been called an obesity “epidemic,” with the population in many different countries becoming steadily larger. Survey...
Problems such as these add support to the view already hinted at, in the discussion of Rogers, that in the case of health and illness, and also for normal and abnormality, the idea of a “reference class” might be inappropriate. A similar point is made in the fictional work A Cunning Manby Canadian novelist Robertson Davies: Vácha also suggests that...
It has become apparent that the use of the concept of normality has ethical implications, whichever interpretation of the concept is adopted. Even if it is not used in ways that explicitly disadvantage particular groups, or to attempt to control behavior, it is commonly used as a bridge for the fact-value gap. It has also been prominent in discussi...
Despite the problems noted by Rogers and others, a future in which the “normal” might not be used in medicine appears challenging. The distribution curve for parameters, such as body temperature, BMI, and cholesterol levels, gives at least a starting point for assessment. Otherwise, how is a physician to begin assessing a patient? It is important, ...
- Ruth Chadwick
- ruth.chadwick@manchester.ac.uk
A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed, and is called a normal deviate. Normal distributions are important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known.
Mar 17, 2021 · Many statistical tests rely on something called the assumption of normality. This assumption states that if we collect many independent random samples from a population and calculate some value of interest (like the sample mean) and then create a histogram to visualize the distribution of sample means, we should observe a perfect bell curve.
Oct 23, 2020 · The standard normal distribution, also called the z-distribution, is a special normal distribution where the mean is 0 and the standard deviation is 1. Every normal distribution is a version of the standard normal distribution that’s been stretched or squeezed and moved horizontally right or left.
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Apr 20, 2012 · Normality Tests. The Shapiro-Wilk test is based on the correlation between the data and the corresponding normal scores (10) and provides better power than the K-S test even after the Lilliefors correction (12).
