CAM625 Introduction To Biostatistics

Critical evaluation

The paper attempts to evaluate critically the article named “Transport behaviors among older teenagers from semi-rural New Zealand”. Ward et al. have developed the concerned article in the year 2015 and published in a journal named “Australian and New Zealand journal of public health. Objective of the critical evaluation is to prepare a report based on clinical data collected observational studies. The evaluation follows the guidelines given in Strobe’ checklist.

Item 1

The referenced article does not have proper sample design. For gathering observational data, request sent to 13 school. Among the 13 school, 12 gave concern to participation in the study. The final study consists of participants both from class study and in-home. The article though mentioned total number of participating students in the study but it does not differentiate between in class and at home participants. So far as gender differentiation in concerned the study has clearly specified number of female and number of male participant. No classification however is given based on the mode of study.

Item 2

The article presents specific mode of transport both as a form of individual number of participant and corresponding percentage of total participants. The transportation percentage has also been portrayed in the form of frequency as well as associated percentage. Ambiguity however has been found regarding the sample size of males and female, transportation mode, transport frustration and license. There is no disclosure about missing sample data in the study. Moreover, the article does not give any clear presentation for analysis of Chi-Square test.

Item 3

The article though has mentioned the rate of collected response but it does not provide any information about number of students in the participating 12 schools. Total response rate as mentioned in the research paper is 71.5 percent. For class-based participants response rate is 77.2 percent while the same for in home participants is 65.6 percent.

Item 4

The article discusses different demographic characteristics of the participants such as gender, location, age, weekly income and ethnicity. The article however does not discusses anything regarding missing data.

Item 5

The article presents the summary measures of the activities. The summary measures include mean, standard deviation and maximum and minimum activity hours for the students. Summary statistics of male and female participants have also been documented in the article.

Item 6

Chi-square test is used to conduct the analysis. The article though provides test significance no discussion is made on confidence interval.

Item 7

The paper conducts analysis into three subgroups. The article discusses association between transportation mode and gender. The sensitivity analysis however is not a part of the paper.