The advantage of having specific criteria is that it excludes what the study considered insignificant traumas. Furthermore, this makes the criteria less subjective since a decreased range in motion is an objective measure, which increases the consistency of the results. However, by having a more narrow scope, it means that the study underestimated the number of participants that were injured acutely. A limitation of only doing radiographs on suspected fractures however, leads to a possible misclassification bias. In this case it could have caused an underestimation of the number wrist fractures since a suspected wrist sprain would not have been looked at with a radiograph. A radiograph was not used to examine risk sprains to save resources, which makes sense since …show more content…
The participant will always be aware as to whether they are in the control or intervention group. This could cause a bias because those that are wearing wrist guards may try riskier runs or manoeuvres due to feel more protected. There is also an increased bias specifically in the study done by O’Neil (2003) because they gave out the wrist guards to those who wanted them at a first come first serve basis. Thus, people who are more safety conscious would have been more likely to agree to wear them. Ronning et al., however, did conduct a single blind study but not informing the doctors which participants who came in with injuries had been wearing braces versus which ones had not. This strengthens the study because if the doctors had known that a participant claiming wrist pain had not been wearing a brace they might be more inclined to diagnose them with a more serious injury since they had less protection. Thus, using the same logic, wrist sprains in participants who wore a brace might be under diagnosed since the doctor knows that the force of the blow was decreased by the