Clinical significance: false positives in the estimation of individual change.

Authors

  • Antonio Pardo Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Madrid, España)
  • Rodrigo Ferrer Universidad de Tarapacá (Arica, Chile)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.29.2.139031
Keywords: Clinically significant change, minimally important difference, false positives.

Abstract

In applied research and in clinical practice we often need to as­sess the change experienced by patients as a result of the treatment they have received. This paper assesses the perfor­mance of several statistical methods designed to estimate such change. This study focuses on one as­pect that still has not received attention: the rate of false positives. We have simulated a situation of no-change (pre-post design with no change be­tween pre and post) in which the behavior of nine different statistics have been eva­luated. Three different sample sizes (25, 50 and 100) were used and 1000 samples of each size were simulated. To evaluate the be­havior of the chosen statistics we have calculated the percentage of ti­mes that each statistic has detected change. Since no-change is the simu­lated situation, any occurrence of change should be considered a false po­sitive. Results are quite striking: none of the nine statistics evaluated offers an acceptable behavior. Good performance is achieved only when the stan­dard deviation of pre-post differences and the traditional criteria are used and not when those proposed by the litera­ture related to the clinical signi­ficance are used.

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Published
28-04-2013
How to Cite
Pardo, A., & Ferrer, R. (2013). Clinical significance: false positives in the estimation of individual change. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 29(2), 301–310. https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.29.2.139031
Issue
Vol. 29 No. 2 (2013)
Section
Clinical and Health Psychology

 

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