Published in:
01-08-2015 | In Brief
Statistics in Brief: An Introduction to the Use of Propensity Scores
Authors:
Maria C. S. Inacio, PhD, Yuexin Chen, BS, Elizabeth W. Paxton, MA, Robert S. Namba, MD, Steven M. Kurtz, PhD, Guy Cafri, PhD, MStat
Published in:
Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®
|
Issue 8/2015
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Excerpt
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard of clinical research because randomization reduces the risk of extraneous factors influencing results of a study [
2]. Nonetheless, high-quality, observational studies are at times more desirable than experimental studies (such as RCTs) owing to the their capacity to evaluate rare events, fewer ethical challenges with conducting the study, feasibility attributable to lower costs or infrastructure needs, and sometimes greater generalizability of the findings because of less-strict inclusion or exclusion criteria for patients and surgeons. Most orthopaedic studies are observational and retrospective [
4,
7,
24]. …
