Within the field of

clinical trial Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human subject research, human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel v ...

s, rating is the process by which a human evaluator subjectively judges the response of a patient to a

medical treatment A therapy or medical treatment (often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx) is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many different ...

. The rating can include more than one treatment response. The accessor is normally an independent observer other than the patient, but the accessor can also be the patient (a patient-reported outcome). Furthermore, some clinical outcomes can only be assessed by the patient (a "private phenomena"). Because the evaluation is subjective, this can result in both inter-rater or

intra-rater reliability In statistics, intra-rater reliability is the degree of agreement among repeated administrations of a diagnostic test performed by a single rater. Intra-rater reliability and inter-rater reliability are aspects of test validity. See also * Inter ...

. When conducting clinical trials, ensuring rating consistency is important, but can prove to be quite difficult to obtain. Studies dealing with such indications as pain,

mental disease A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...

or mood are not able to easily track progress with physical or physiological testing, rather, verbal subjective human testing is used. This can allow for an array of differences in rating. Blinded assessors who are not told which treatment group a patient belongs to have a significantly lower observer bias compared to non-blinded assessors. Rater training is sometimes used in an attempt to lower rater variability.

References

{{Reflist, 32em Rating Clinical trials