Becoming confident about confidence intervals

A clear understanding of variability is at the heart of many of the articles published by the Bone and Joint Journal. The terms variability, dispersion, spread, distribution and variance amongst many others are used to simply refer to the range of values within the dataset. Statistics was essentially founded as the study of variability, with variability often regarded as a nuisance. Measures of variability can be difficult concepts to comprehend when reading papers. They range from the relatively simple to the more complex.