Week 6 Discussion: Confidence Interval Concepts

Hello Professor and class

The scholarly article that I choose for this week's discussion is entitled “Incarceration and Number of Sexual Partners After Incarceration Among Vulnerable US Women, 2007-2017”. It is a 10 years study on women living with or at risk for HIV that examines whether women’s incarceration increases numbers of total and new sexual partners. As Knittel et al., (2020, p. 101) claim, “guided by the social-ecological framework and network theory” this research “hypothesized that incarceration would result in more total and new sexual partners, likely because of changes in social circumstances and sexual networks.”

The article states that 3,180 women participate in the research in 26,890 visits. That means the sample size of this research is 3,180. 95% level of confidence used to create the confidence interval in this research. The research findings indicate that “women reported 2 partners, 3 or more partners, and new partners at 5.2%, 5.2%, and 9.3% of visits, respectively” (Knittel et al., 2020). The research uses odd ratio which is a measure of association for a case-control study (CDC, 2013) to analyze the findings. For instance, the research states that the odd ratio for women reported having 2 partners immediately and at all visits following incarceration is 2.03 with  confidence interval of (1.20, 4.85) with a 95% confidence level. As 2.03 is greater than 1.0, it indicates that odd of having 2 partners is 2.03 times higher among women who were incarcerated than those who were not. Therefore, the odds ratio of 2.03 with the confidence interval of 1.20- 4.85 suggests that there is a probability that the true odds ratio would be likely to lie in the range of 1.20 and 4.85 with a 95% confidence level.

Reference:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2013). Interpreting Results of Case-Control Studies. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/training/SIC_CaseStudy/Interpreting_Odds_ptversion.pdf (Links to an external site.)

Knittel, A. K., Shook-Sa, B. E., Rudolph, J., Edmonds, A., Ramirez, C … Adimora, A. A. (2020). Incarceration and Number of Sexual Partners After Incarceration Among Vulnerable US Women, 2007–2017. American Journal of Public Health, 110, S100. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305410 (Links to an external site.)

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• Collapse SubdiscussionSherri HernandezSherri Hernandez
  
  ThursdayAug 13 at 7:24amManage Discussion EntryClara
  
  The confidence interval given here is for a ratio.  Please only look for confidence intervals for a population mean or proportion.  Your updated post will not be considered late.  Thank you.  Reply Reply to Comment