Methods Workshop: Rethinking the Measurement of Demographic Differences in Outcome Rates

This workshop will address the flaws in standard measures of differences between outcome rates for appraising demographic differences in the law and the social and medical sciences. The standard measures cannot effectively quantify the difference in circumstances of advantaged and disadvantaged groups reflected by differing rates of experiencing some favorable or adverse outcome because each measure tends to be systematically affected by the prevalence of an outcome. The only sound method of appraising the differences in the circumstances of advantaged and disadvantaged reflected by a pair of outcome rates is to derive from each pair of rates the difference between means of the underlying distributions.

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