title: Construction of confidence limits about effect measures: a general approach.
abstract: It is widely accepted that confidence interval construction has important advantages over significance testing for the presentation of research results, as now facilitated by readily available software. However, for a number of effect measures, procedures are either not available or not satisfactory in samples of small to moderate size. In this paper, we describe a general approach for estimating a difference between effect measures, which can also be used to obtain confidence limits for a risk ratio and a lognormal mean. Numerical evaluation shows that this closed-form procedure outperforms existing methods, including the bootstrap.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont., Canada N6A 5C1. gzou@robarts.ca
authors.forename: G Y
authors.initials: GY
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Donner
mesh_terms: D001249:Asthma / Q000188:drug therapy; D003198:Computer Simulation; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D016017:Odds Ratio; D012107:Research Design