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: Whether you agree or not, you can't dispute that 25% failed to answer the most important question in the survey.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 00:11, 2 May 2007 (EDT)
: Whether you agree or not, you can't dispute that 25% failed to answer the most important question in the survey.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 00:11, 2 May 2007 (EDT)
::It certainly needs looking at, and I will paste the appropriate paragraph for people more accustomed than me to statistical analysis to comment on. However, let's address the issue of language here. The term 'spontaneous abortion' is the correct medical term for a miscarriage, and the term that was used in the questionnaire. The people answering the questionnaire were all registered nurses - ie had all been fully trained and qualified in nursing. All nurses spend part of their training in obstetrics and gynaecology, and would be familiar with that medical training. The argument that this highly trained medically qualified group of women would not recognise the term 'spontaneous abortion' as meaning 'miscarriage', especially when paired with the phrase 'induced abortion' as an opposite, is ludicrous. I think even non-medically-qualified people such as yourself would know the difference between the word 'spontaneous' meaning 'happened on its own' and 'induced' meaning 'somebody made it happen' in this context. The article needs changing to remove this rather silly sentence. Incidentally, 12% is not at all 'high' in terms of spontaneous abortion - if anything, it seems to me rather on the low side. A rate of 15-20% is usually quoted. Here is one medical reference that seems to bear that out, when it compares the rate of spontaneous abortion in normal and diabetic women. [http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/319/25/1617]
::The paragraph on statistical analysis reads as follows:
<blockquote>Our analyses included all women who answered the questions on abortion throughout follow-up between 1993 and 2003. In 1993, some women responded only to the question on induced abortion but omitted the spontaneous abortion question and vice versa. Of the 105 716 women included in this analysis, 28 392 did not answer the question on induced abortion but answered the question on spontaneous abortion; 13 652 of these women indicated that they had a spontaneous abortion. We assumed that the women who answered only half of the question did not answer the other question because of an oversight or because they felt that the question did not apply to them; we thus coded the missing response as "no induced abortion." Similarly, 22 768 women did not answer the question on spontaneous abortion in 1993; of these, 9167 answered that they had an induced abortion. We again coded the nonresponses as "no spontaneous abortion." Information on induced and spontaneous abortion was updated biennially; since a response option of "no" was not provided on subsequent questionnaires, a response of "no" was coded for either abortion if "yes" was not marked. We conducted sensitivity analyses of our approach. Results did not change when we excluded nonresponses to half of the 1993 question from the analyses or coded a missing response as "no" only if the other part of the question was answered with "yes." </blockquote>--[[User:Britinme|Britinme]] 10:40, 2 May 2007 (EDT)