The utility cyclist wrote:pjclinch wrote:The utility cyclist wrote:and same in Australia
“School based Bicycle Safety Education and Bicycle Injuries in Children: A Case-Control Study”, John Carlin, Injury Prevention, 1998"
If you're going to quote "case-control" studies that are using methodologies that don't really fit with case-control best practice (e.g., not randomised and blind) but that happen to fit your favoured results then you're going to have to take those that
don't come up with stuff you like (i.e., most of the stuff that says bike helmets are Wondrous) at face value too.
The utility cyclist wrote:The report concludes that there is no evidence that the Bike Ed course results in a lower accident risk, and some evidence that children who have taken a course face a higher risk[/b], possibly because some parents believed the “Bike Ed” course “immunised” their children against road safety risks
Or quite possibly they faced higher exposure because they rode their bikes more often? A pretty sure way of cutting your absolute risk of a bike accident is to cycle much less (ideally, stop altogether).
The literature is full of howlers. Unless you're reading the whole paper, with the analytical skills to do that and probably following up a lot of the references, it's skating on very, very thin ice just taking the conclusions and abstracts at face value. After all, that's what has led to so many people thinking helmets are 85% effective at reducing serious head injury.
So you ignored the whole of GB study by Hertfordshire CC that said 61% of cycle trained kids had no difference to casualties? This was actually a few years after the report that said cycle trained kids had three times less the risk of untrained kids, a study fom THIRTY years ago.
I have not made much in the way of comment on that report.
What I was doing was suggesting you're on rather shifting sands if you choose to ignore a whole category of papers on the (entirely reasonable) grounds that their methodologies aren't really fit for purpose, but then shout out about the supposed truthiness of reports that make similarly poor use of methodology.
You can either have your cake or eat it. You can't have both.
The utility cyclist wrote:Believe what you want but teaching kids to wear hi-vis and helmets, normalising it, teaching them to take all the responsibility to be safe or supposedly die as opposed to more stringent rules for the adults/those in killing machines is simply not working, never has worked and will continue not to work except to continue to blame kids for their injuries or even death and will continue to deflect away from the real issues.
I believe there's good cause to think that's broadly true, but I don't think that's a particularly safe conclusion from one report with what is probably a misconstrued attempt to use case-control for something it doesn't really work for.
The utility cyclist wrote:If kids without training are not having as many injuries or same level in some areas then this is very telling indeed and not entirely unsurprising.
It
may be telling but without looking at it in rather more detail to isolate confounders it would be jumping rather to speedily to conclusions, mainly on the basis that it tells you what you want to hear. Cognitive bias at work. Again, I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I'm saying your degree of certainty and the methodology that underpins it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.
The utility cyclist wrote:I wonder what the hat wearing % is of cycle trained kids (outside of the cycle training programme) and how much more risk they will take compared to those without training who are less likely to wear a plastic hat?
So what are you doing to find out, and how do you know it will be accurate?
Pete.
Often seen riding a bike around Dundee...