Solved – Use example to explain odds ratio to layperson audience

intuitionlogisticodds-ratioregression

I found an example of how to express odds-ratios in plain english. Here is the link http://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/risk.pdf

It says:

How does one express an OR of 0.15 in plain English. Had this been a RR would have said that the intervention reduced the risk by 85%. Because it is an OR we must say that for every 15 persons who experienced the event in the experimental group 100 persons experienced the event in the control group.

I find this a useful explanation for a lay audience. I have two logistic regression models with a categorical independent variable that I need to report odds ratios for.

If the odds ratio for group a (compared to group b) is 1.75, can I say that for every 175 persons in group a that experienced the event, 100 persons in group b did, while controlling for the other variables?

My second model has an odds ratio less than 1 so I would use the quoted example.

Are there any concerns with this approach?

Best Answer

The nearest I every got to somebody accepting Odds Ratios was this, with the expressed thought process of my listener in italics

  • The odds ratio for a $2\%$ probability compared to a $1\%$ probability is about $2$, and so the odds ratio of a $1\%$ probability compared to a $2\%$ probability is about $0.5$.
    • OK, though I do not quite see why you say it is "about" rather than "exactly". But I am not worried about that.
  • Similarly the odds ratio for a $99\%$ probability compared to a $98\%$ probability is about $2$, and so the odds ratio of a $98\%$ probability compared to a $99\%$ probability is about $0.5$
    • That is peculiar, but I can see that you cannot double probabilities of things that are very likely, and I can see that in this case you are going half the way to $100\%$ instead of doubling the distance from $0\%$. So I will accept that as reasonable in some sense.
  • The odds ratio for a $59\%$ probability compared to a $41\%$ probability is about $2$, and so the odds ratio of a $41\%$ probability compared to a $59\%$ probability is about $0.5$
    • I have no idea why those particular probabilities give an odds ratio of about $2$ rather than something else. But your previous statements were more or less plausible, and I know you are a professional statistician, so I will trust you on this.
  • Bigger increases in probabilities lead to larger odds ratios and smaller increases to smaller odds ratios. For example a $4\%$ probability compared to a $1\%$ probability, and a $99\%$ probability compared to a $96\%$ probability, and a $67\%$ probability compared to a $33\%$ probability, all correspond to odds ratios of about $4$.
    • Those first two examples make a lot of sense given what you said earlier, though the third looks counter-intuitive: one probability is about double the other but you say the odds ratio is about $4$ not $2$. That is not what I would have guessed. But in a sense I can see the point: a $67\%$ probability is what bookmakers might say is "two-to-one-on" while a $33\%$ probability is what bookmakers might say is "two-to-one-against" and so they might say one has four times the odds of the other. But I can see I could still get confused and will have to be careful using odds ratios.