{"id":6164,"date":"2013-08-02T13:24:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T13:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pharma-mkting.com\/are-african-americans-more-distrustfu\/"},"modified":"2019-02-21T01:17:19","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T01:17:19","slug":"are-african-americans-more-distrustfu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ec2-54-175-84-28.compute-1.amazonaws.com\/pharma-mkting.com\/blog\/are-african-americans-more-distrustfu\/","title":{"rendered":"Are African-Americans More Distrustful of Clinical Trials Than All Other Americans? Depends on How You Chart the Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read with interest the piece “A Matter Of Trust: Minorities Are Suspicious Of Clinical Trials<\/a>” by Ed Silverman, author of Pharmalot blog. The post summarized key points of a Research!America poll of U.S. adults conducted in May 2013.<\/p>\n

“A key issue is a lack of trust,” noted Silverman. He was probably referring to a chart on page 8 of the survey report (find it here<\/a>). This chart plotted the percentage of respondents — broken down into racial categories — who said “lack of trust” was a reason individuals do not participate in clinical trials. From the looks of this chart, it appears that African-Americans are very much more distrustful of clinical trials than ALL other ethnic groups.<\/p>\n

The Research!America bar chart is misleading because it employs a trick often used to exaggerate the difference in data points: it does not label the X-axis and I suspect the scale does not start at 0. This makes the African-American data bar look much bigger than all the others.<\/p>\n

To test my hypothesis, I replotted the data and created the following montage comparing my plot (at bottom) with the Research!America plot (at the top):<\/p>\n

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\nWhat looks like a BIG difference between African-Americans and other ethnic groups in the Research!America chart  is really not that big of a difference at all. NOTE: The same percentage of African-Americans have participated in clinical trials as have other Americans<\/p>\n

A commenter (“original industry insider”; John LaMattina?) to Silverman’s post pointed out what is statistically significant and not statistically significant with regard to these data:<\/p>\n