Child eyewitness researchers often bin age: Prevalence of the practice and recommendations for analyzing developmental trends.
Child eyewitness researchers often bin age: Prevalence of the practice and recommendations for analyzing developmental trends.
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DOI：
10.1037/lhb0000416
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发表时间：
2020-08
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Poole DA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bainter SA;Tibbe TD;Goodman ZT;Poole DA
有效的做法，引出和分析儿童的目击者报告依赖于准确的结论，年龄差异的儿童如何保留信息和记忆探针的反应。分组是将连续变量分类为离散组的做法，可以降低研究检测年龄差异的能力，在某些情况下，会产生显著但虚假的影响。在本文中，我们（1）描述了一个系统的审查，估计频率的分组年龄在儿童目击者的研究，（2）分析真实的和模拟数据，以说明如何分组可以扭曲的结论，年龄和协变量的影响，（3）展示了最佳做法，分析和报告年龄的趋势。我们预计研究人员会经常将年龄分组，并且我们会在演示数据集中复制分组的负面后果。在系统性综述中，我们检索了58篇描述儿童目击者研究的文章，并确定研究人员是否将年龄纳入一篇随机选择的分析。然后，我们比较了分析实际和模拟数据集的替代方法。研究人员在64%的分析中对年龄进行了分组（88%的分析涉及实验操作，35%的非实验分析，P = .55，p < .01）。当年龄被视为分类时，真实的数据示例中的显著年龄趋势是不显著的，并且在模拟数据集中，我们演示了这种做法如何导致检测到虚假效应。将年龄视为一个连续变量，可以最大限度地提高发现真实的差异的能力，而不会增加虚假结果的频率，从而确保有关儿童目击者的政策反映儿童需求和能力的发展变化。
Effective practices for eliciting and analyzing children’s eyewitness reports rely on accurate conclusions about age differences in how children retain information and respond to memory probes. Binning, which is the practice of categorizing continuous variables into discrete groups, can lower studies’ power to detect age differences and, in some situations, produce significant but spurious effects. In this paper, we (1) describe a systematic review that estimated the frequency of binning age in child eyewitness studies, (2) analyze real and simulated data to illustrate how binning can distort conclusions about age and covariate effects, and (3) demonstrate best practices for analyzing and reporting age trends. We expected that researchers would frequently bin age and that we would replicate the negative consequences of binning in the demonstration datasets. For the systematic review, we retrieved 58 articles describing child eyewitness studies and determined whether researchers binned age for one randomly-selected analysis per article. We then compared alternative ways of analyzing actual and simulated datasets. Researchers binned age for 64% of the analyses (88% of analyses involving experimental manipulations vs. 35% of the nonexperimental analyses, ϕ = .55, p < .01). A significant age trend in the real data example was nonsignificant when age was treated as categorical, and in the simulated datasets we demonstrate how this practice may lead to detecting a spurious effect. Treating age as a continuous variable maximizes power to detect real differences without inflating the frequency of spurious results, thereby ensuring that policies regarding child eyewitnesses reflect developmental changes in children’s needs and abilities.
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影响因子：
7
作者：
MacCallum, RC;Zhang, SB;Rucker, DD
通讯作者：
Rucker, DD
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通讯作者：
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