Are African-Americans More Distrustful of Clinical Trials Than All Other Americans? Depends on How You Chart the Data

I read with interest the piece "A Matter Of Trust: Minorities Are Suspicious Of Clinical Trials" by Ed Silverman, author of Pharmalot blog. The post summarized key points of a Research!America poll of U.S. adults conducted in May 2013."A key issue is a lack of trust," noted Silverman. He was probably referring to a chart on page 8 of the survey report (find it here). This chart plotted the percentage of respondents -- broken down into racial categories -- who said "lack of trust" was a reason individuals do not participate in clinical trials. From the looks of this chart, it appears that African-Americans are very much more distrustful of clinical trials than ALL other ethnic groups.The Research!America bar chart is misleading because it employs a trick often used to exaggerate the difference in data points: it does not label the X-axis and I suspect the scale does not start at 0. This makes the African-American data bar look much bigger than all the others.To test my hypothesis, I replotted the data and created the following montage comparing my plot (at bottom) with the Research!America plot (at the top):What looks like a BIG difference between African-Americans and other ethnic groups in the Research!America chart  is really not that big of a difference at all. NOTE: The same percentage of African-Americans have participated in clinical trials as have other AmericansA commenter ("original industry insider"; John LaMattina?) to Silverman's...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: trust Clinical Trials R and D Privacy Reputation Source Type: blogs