Dataset Information

Child eyewitness researchers often bin age: Prevalence of the practice and recommendations for analyzing developmental trends.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

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 article, we (a) describe a systematic review that estimated the frequency of binning age in child eyewitness studies, (b) analyze real and simulated data to illustrate how binning can distort conclusions about age and covariate effects, and (c) demonstrate best practices for analyzing and reporting age trends.

Hypotheses

We expected that researchers would frequently bin age and that we would replicate the negative consequences of binning in the demonstration data sets.

Method

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 data sets.

Results

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 data sets we demonstrate how this practice may lead to detecting a spurious effect.

Conclusions

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

SUBMITTER: Bainter SA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7880046 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:AimThese international clinical practice recommendations (CPR) for developmental coordination disorder (DCD), initiated by the European Academy of Childhood Disability (EACD), aim to address key questions on the definition, diagnosis, assessment, intervention, and psychosocial aspects of DCD relevant for clinical practice.MethodKey questions in five areas were considered through literature reviews and formal expert consensus. For recommendations based on evidence, literature searches on 'mechanisms', 'assessment', and 'intervention' were updated since the last recommendations in 2012. New searches were conducted for 'psychosocial issues' and 'adolescents/adults'. Evidence was rated according to the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (level of evidence [LOE] 1-4) and transferred into recommendations. For recommendations based on formal consensus, two meetings of an international, multidisciplinary expert panel were conducted with a further five Delphi rounds to develop good clinical practice (GCP) recommendations.ResultsThirty-five recommendations were made. Eight were based on the evidence from literature reviews (three on 'assessment', five on 'intervention'). Twenty-two were updated from the 2012 recommendations. New recommendations relate to diagnosis and assessment (two GCPs) and psychosocial issues (three GCPs). Additionally, one new recommendation (LOE) reflects active video games as adjuncts to more traditional activity-oriented and participation-oriented interventions, and two new recommendations (one GCP, one LOE) were made for adolescents and adults with DCD.InterpretationThe CPR-DCD is a comprehensive overview of DCD and current understanding based on research evidence and expert consensus. It reflects the state of the art for clinicians and scientists of varied disciplines. The international CPR-DCD may serve as a basis for national guidelines.What this paper addsUpdated international clinical practice guidelines on developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Refined and extended recommendations on clinical assessment and intervention for DCD. A critical synopsis of current research on mechanisms of DCD. A critical synopsis of psychosocial issues in DCD, with implications for clinical practice. The first international recommendations to consider adolescents and adults with DCD.