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When evaluating risk, I like knowing the absolute consequences, not relative consequences. The abstract has the relative consequences. My comment has the absolu
by arjie 9y ago
When evaluating risk, I like knowing the absolute consequences, not relative consequences. The abstract has the relative consequences. My comment has the absolute consequences.
Since there are maybe a fixed 230 working days in a year, a thing that takes me from 10 absences to 12 absences is worse for me than a thing that takes me from 1 absence to 2 absences. I'd rather not compare the two as 20% up vs 100% up.
If anyone else felt the same, my comment would help.
- DangerousPie 9y agoThat's fair enough, but the numbers you give are neither the absolute nor the relative consequences. You can't draw any conclusions from simply comparing the medians. On one hand that completely ignores any confounding variables which could lead to either over- or underestimation of the true difference. And on the other hand the medians may not be particularly meaningful. For example, if the effect only occurred in the top 25%ile of employees, the median would stay the same even if all of the ones in open plan offices were sick for the entire year. If you took the mean instead of the median the difference would already be 8.1 - 4.9 = 3.2 days.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- arjie 9y agoI've edited the comment to include the mean values from the paper. I'm comfortable with the two measures as a better summary of the results than the RR in the abstract.