title: A brief note on overlapping confidence intervals.
abstract: Clinical researchers frequently assess the statistical significance of the difference between two means by examining whether the two 95% confidence intervals overlap. The purpose of this brief communication is to illustrate that the 95% confidence intervals for two means can overlap and yet the two means can be statistically significantly different from one another at the alpha = 0.05 level.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. peter.austin@ices.on.ca
authors.forename: Peter C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Austin
authors.forename: Janet E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Hux
mesh_terms: D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans