Odds ratio and Units

[Mathis1]

Hi,

Here is an excerpt of a traning quizz for the sas certification: 

Answer A seems more correct to me. What do you think ? 

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

I think that you have skipped on the description provided.

Are the values of the salary in dollar amounts: $102,454.18 or in thousands such as 102 for $102,000?

From the answer I suspect that salary was provided in thousands but you skipped any description actually provided of the input data set. Potentially bits in the code might also address this issue but without code can't say for sure.

You need need to know the units that a variable is collected in to apply the interpretation correctly.

[Mathis1]

Unfortunately the quizz doesn't provide any extra information... Maybe the salary is given in thousand of dollars indeed.

[Reeza]

Where did you find this question?

[ballardw]

One suspects that there is an introduction that describes the data set and then the set is used for multiple questions. The introduction could be many questions previously.

If there is no such description anywhere I would hope that you are not spending any money on this practice quiz as they don't know how to present information needed to answer questions.

[FreelanceReinh]

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@Mathis1 wrote:
Unfortunately the quizz doesn't provide any extra information... Maybe the salary is given in thousand of dollars indeed.

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Hi @Mathis1,

Given this odds ratio (1.142) and the alternative of 1 $ or 1000 $ for the unit of the salary variable, you can virtually rule out the possibility of 1 $ with common sense: Assuming monthly or yearly salaries, differences between two values in a realistic dataset will likely be several hundred dollars or more, say, 500 $ for example. However, an odds ratio of 1.142**500 > 5E28 is obviously nonsensical -- regardless of the "event" in question.