Hidden figures: Revisiting doping prevalence estimates previously reported for two major international sport events in the context of further empirical evidence and the extant literature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background High levels of admitted doping use (43.6% and 57.1%) were reported for two international sport events in 2011. Because these are frequently referenced in evaluating aspects of anti-doping, having high level of confidence in these estimates is paramount. Objectives In this study, we present new prevalence estimates from a concurrently administered method, the Single Sample Count (SSC), and critically review the two sets of estimates in the context of other doping prevalence estimates. Methods The survey featuring the SSC model was completed by 1,203 athletes at the 2011 World Championships in Athletics (WCA) (65.3% of all participating athletes) and 954 athletes at the 2011 Pan-Arab Games (PAG) (28.2% of all participating athletes). At WCA, athletes completed both UQM and SSC surveys in randomised order. At PAG, athletes were randomly allocated to one of the two surveys. Doping was defined as “having knowingly violated anti-doping regulations by using a prohibited substance or method.” Results Estimates with the SSC model for 12-month doping prevalence were 21.2% (95% CI: 9.69–32.7) at WCA and 10.6% (95% CI: 1.76–19.4) at PAG. Estimated herbal, mineral, and/or vitamin supplements use was 8.57% (95% CI: 1.3–16.11) at PAG. Reliability of the estimates were confirmed with re-sampling method ( n = 1,000, 80% of the sample). Survey non-compliance (31.90%, 95%CI: 26.28–37.52; p < 0.0001) was detected in the WCA data but occurred to a lesser degree at PAG (9.85%, 95% CI: 4.01–15.69, p = 0.0144 and 11.43%, 95% CI: 5.31–11.55, p = 0.0196, for doping and nutritional supplement use, respectively). A large discrepancy between those previously reported from the UQM and the prevalence rate estimated by the SSC model for the same population is evident. Conclusion Caution in interpreting these estimates as bona fide prevalence rates is warranted. Critical appraisal of the obtained prevalence rates and triangulation with other sources are recommended over “the higher rate must be closer to the truth” heuristics. Non-compliance appears to be the Achilles heel of the indirect estimation models thus it should be routinely tested for and minimised. Further research into cognitive and behaviour aspects, including motivation for honesty, is needed to improve the ecological validity of the estimated prevalence rates.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it