For quality assessment of observational studies, as done in a systematic review, a number of scales exist. The major ones are ROBINS-I, Newcastle Ottawa Scale, and Appraisal Tool for Cross-Sectional Studies (AXIS).
1. Which of these is best validated and the most widely used?
2. Should there be a field-specific preference for either of these (for instance, medicine vs nursing vs psychology)?
ROBINS-I is the most widespread tool used to assess the risk of bias of observational studies, instead, the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale is used to assess the quality of the studies. Although the quality evaluation depends on the evaluation of the risk of bias, these evaluations are not the same, because they are assessing different aspects in the design, execution, validity, and precision of a study. Sterne JAC, Hernán MA, McAleenan A, Reeves BC, Higgins JPT. Chapter 25: Assessing risk of bias in a non-randomized study. In: Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.0 (updated July 2019). Cochrane, 2019. Available from www.training.cochrane.org/handbook.
Any validated tool can be used but I personally believe that Newcastle Ottawa Scale is quite handy for observational studies.
https://methods.cochrane.org/methods-cochrane/robins-i-tool Suggest ROBINS-I tool for ROB assessmnet
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Statistical Techniques
- Meta-Analysis