Normative Data for the Balance Error Scoring System in Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background. The balance error scoring system (BESS) is a brief, easily administered test of static balance. The purpose of this study is to develop normative data for this test. Study Design. Cross-sectional, descriptive, and cohort design. Methods. The sample was drawn from a population of clients taking part in a comprehensive preventive health screen at a multidisciplinary healthcare center. Community-dwelling adults aged 20-69 (N = 1, 236) were administered the BESS within the context of a fitness evaluation. They did not have significant medical, neurological, or lower extremity problems that might have an adverse effect on balance. Results. There was a significant positive correlation between BESS scores and age (r = .34). BESS performance was similar for participants between the ages of 20 and 49 and significantly declined between ages 50 and 69. Men performed slightly better than women on the BESS. Women who were overweight performed significantly more poorly on the test compared to women who were not overweight (P < .0001; Cohen's d = .62). The BESS normative data are stratified by age and sex. Conclusions. These normative data provide a frame of reference for interpreting BESS performance in adults who sustain traumatic brain injuries and adults with diverse neurological or vestibular problems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".