Inferential Statistics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 3

Inferential Statistics - Essay Example The study aimed at establishing whether the Federal workers’ compensation cases referred to Navy physicians for medical opinions in any way had an influence on the final decision made by the Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCPs) (p.18). Some independent variables were claimant’s age and categories of the case (p.19). The dependent variable was â€Å"decision outcomes†. The study tested whether decision outcome in the compensation cases was dependent on the physician’s review report. The researchers used a descriptive epidemiological study to select the 325 worker’s compensation cases from the navy injury compensation programme administrators. The cases were sampled from all over the United States between 2006 and 2010. The filed selected cases were treated as participants in this study, although the owners were not directly interviewed. The particular bias inherent in the study was that the cases tested were the ones which the ICPAs analysed as unusual, and thus needed a support from a physician. If this was the case, the physicians would have rejected most of the cases, which did not require a physician to strengthen the claim (p.19). However, the researchers were alarmed by the fact that physicians recommended in favour of the claimant in most of the referred cases. Since the review was found to influence decision, the whole process might have had a degree of bias. In the study, the researchers used retrospective case study and descriptive analysis of the 258 physician opinion letters written between 2006 and 2010. They used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test the significance of the relationship between the dependent and independent variables. One ethical concern is the disclosure of the medical records of the claimants without their consent. Given that they were not requested when their information was being tracked, neither were their physicians, this can