In a message dated 11/11/00 12:25:31 AM, mail@HarveyNewstrom.com writes:
>How can we trust any count if it changes every time?
>Wouldn't we want the count to remain stable?
Presumably. But having worked with forms (clinical trials) I can assure you
humans find all kinds of fascinating ways to fill out forms in ways you don't
anticipate. When you try to figure it out, the result is that your numbers
change every time due to judgements calls you're forced to make. There's
just no way around it.
Usually it doesn't matter, we're just dealing with one of those rare cases
where it does.
In our case we started out with yes/no boxes for complications. But some
doctors would just skip the "no" boxes no matter how much we told them
not to. This gave us legally uncompleted forms, so we dropped the "no"
box . THEN doctors started skipping the "yes" boxes and putting complications
in the comments! So we put in word searches for complication names.
Then we run into doctors who wanted to brag about how they *didn't* have
particular complications (one just loved to list ALL the major complictions,
with
some indication the patient did not have it.) In the end we had to correct
most forms ourselves and send them back for signature, often multiple
times.
This is *doctors* dealing with *yes/no* boxes. What amazes me about the
Palm Beach business is not that 2% did their ballots wrong but that 98%
did them right.
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