Deep inelastic scattering is considered in a statistical model of the nucleon. This incorporates certain features which are absent in the standard parton model such as quantum statistical correlations which play a role in the propagation of particles when considering Feynman diagrams containing internal lines.The inclusion of the O(α s ) corrections in our numerical calculations allows a good fit to the data for x ≥ 0.25. The fit corresponds to values of temperature and chemical potential of approximately T = 0.067 GeV and µ = 0.133 GeV. The latter values of parameters, however, give rise, for all x, to a large value for R = σ L /σ T .