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The study has examined 166 individuals. Some sub-group of these were depressed, and many depressed people could be identified based on photos. This is then com
by jpttsn 10y ago
The study has examined 166 individuals. Some sub-group of these were depressed, and many depressed people could be identified based on photos.
This is then compared with GP's rate of success at diagnosing depression. I fear that's a slightly misleading comparison, because the study works with a different pool of patients to be diagnosed than the typical GP. The Instagram methodology solves a different, maybe easier, problem.
- disgruntledphd2 10y agoYeah, and the samples don't seem like they come from the same population. You have to go to the Appendix, but it appears that 71 of the sample were depressed (which presumably means that they have answered yes to the depression question). It's not clear if they used the CES to identify depression. The remaining participants were classified as healthy (N=95). These do not seem like balanced samples to me, at least (it would be nice if we knew what proportion of depressed vs not depressed agreed to share IG data). Additionally, the appendices also mention that gender was not available for the depressed sample, which leads me to believe that they collected one sample of depressed participants and then another from the general population. This is a little shady (at least to me). All that being said, I really like this paper. I think that the approach is novel, they use pretty good methods and it actually represents a contribution (if small) to human knowledge. And I definitely went in with a prior against it. The sample size is far too small to support their inferences, but that's a less hard problem to fix :)