Citation

Needleman HL. Int. J. Occup. Med. Environ. Health 2004; 17(1): 111-114.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. hlnlead@pitt.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, Lodz and the Polish Association of Occupational Medicine, Publisher Walter de Gruyter)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

15212213

Abstract

In the environmental health literature, errors in interpreting studies or data are not infrequent. Many are of the Type II variety. Common solecisms of this type are: treating the criterion of p < 0.05 as a sacrament; demanding complete confounder control; arguing for the existence of phantom confounders; arguing that the effect size is trivial; building nonveridical models; arguing for no effect from inadequate sample size; demanding causal proof; arguing that causality is reversed; conducting a ballot of published studies. These are examined in this paper.

Language: en