Recommendations on when and why to use the risk ratio or odds ratio.

What is it about?

Recommendations on what relative measure of association (e.g., risk ratio or odds ratio) to use and when to use them. This article contains a review of the methods, along with code for fitting various statistical models to obtain risk ratios in four software packages: R, SAS, Stata, and SPSS.

Featured Image

Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash

Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash

Why is it important?

There are still many areas of research (including global health) where logistic regression is used by default, even when reporting odds ratios may be not be most appropriate. Some of this is because of convention, or because the logistic regression approach is what many people initially learn and default to using. Our paper provides rationale for when and why the risk ratio may be preferred, and we provide code to facilitate the use of these methods by researchers.