Ottenbacher K J
Am J Occup Ther. 1986 Jul;40(7):464-9. doi: 10.5014/ajot.40.7.464.
As the number of single-subject research reports in the occupational therapy literature increases, the reliability of clinical decisions made from single-subject data must be determined. This study examined the ability of occupational therapists to reliably and accurately analyze data from single-subject designs using visual inspection of graphed data. Forty-six therapists provided a rating on whether or not a clinically significant change in performance had occurred across the baseline and treatment phases for five graphs of hypothetical data. The results revealed that considerable disagreement existed in making visual judgments based on the five graphs. The data sets were also analyzed using a recently developed statistical procedure for use with single-subject data. The level of agreement between the quantitative analysis and the visual analysis was also poor, suggesting inconsistency in the ability to make accurate visual judgments of single-subject data. The advantages and limitations of graphic presentation and visual inspection of single-subject data are discussed and the argument is made that some form of quantitative analysis should generally be used in conjunction with the visual inspection of graphed data.
随着职业治疗文献中单病例研究报告数量的增加，必须确定基于单病例数据做出的临床决策的可靠性。本研究考察了职业治疗师使用图表数据的视觉检查来可靠且准确地分析单病例设计数据的能力。46名治疗师针对五组假设数据的图表，对基线期和治疗期之间表现是否发生了具有临床意义的变化给出了评分。结果显示，基于这五张图表进行视觉判断时存在相当大的分歧。还使用一种最近开发的用于单病例数据的统计程序对数据集进行了分析。定量分析和视觉分析之间的一致性水平也很差，这表明在对单病例数据进行准确视觉判断的能力方面存在不一致。本文讨论了单病例数据图表呈现和视觉检查的优点和局限性，并提出一般应结合图表数据的视觉检查使用某种形式的定量分析。
