Introduction:

Biostatistics is core in evidence-based medicine and thus for novel doctors to acquire key skills in their future career.

Aims:

To document attitudes towards statistics and to explore its determinants in postgraduate medical students.

Subjects and methods:

Observational, cross-sectional and analytical study in resident doctors who were pursuing a postgraduate degree in research at the University of Zaragoza who responded to the Spanish version of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics-28 (SATS-28).

Results:

The 93.2% ( n = 41) of attendees responded. SATS-28 average score was 4.43 ± 0.72. The scores on the sub-scales indicated that students conceive Statistics as very useful but difficult. Multiple regression showed that women had better attitudes towards statistics, obtaining a total score 0.5 points higher than men ( p = 0.046).

Conclusions:

Medicine residents have good attitude towards statistics, although more research focused on changes in teaching methodology is needed, even since the beginning of the degree, to improve the perception about its difficulty.

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