Treatment by Condition Related to pravastatin. Selected from data included with permission and copyrighted by First Databank, Inc. This copyrighted material has been downloaded from a licensed data provider and is not for distribution, expect as may be authorized by the applicable terms of use. CONDITIONS OF USE: The information in this database is intended to supplement, not substitute for, the expertise and judgment of healthcare professionals.
The operational definition of a variable is the specific way in which it is measured in that study. Another study might measure the same conceptual measure differently. If you were studying ways of helping people stop smoking, smoking cessation would be an outcome measure (dependent variable).
One problem with using the mean, is that it often does not depict the typical outcome. If there is one outcome that is very far from the rest of the data, then the mean will be strongly affected by this outcome. Such an outcome is called and outlier. An alternative measure is the median. The median is the middle score. If we have an even number of events we take the average of the two middles.