Best statistical study for comparing at home

bobg4400

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I guess I'm one of those people where the FSL doesn't correspond to BPEL at all.
This wasn't too surprising since It's always been not particularly stretchy. At any rate it was 6.5 FSL and 7.5 BPEL.

Also what is interobserver variation?
Also I just noticed it mentions that their penis was measured in front of their guardians. This seems kinda weird since having their parents in the room doesn't seem to add anything to the study.
Also i'm surprised a micropenis is set at anything below 4.3 inches. While 4.3 inches is small I would never consider it to be a micropenis.
Also it seems to mention that the people are slected based on the fact that they come to the hospital regularly becuae of issues with their penis size or something?
It seems like this would rule out the larger guys who would be more comfortable with themselves and skew the averages downwards?
 
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ShannonH

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I guess I'm one of those people where the FSL doesn't correspond to BPEL at all.
This wasn't too surprising since It's always been not particularly stretchy. At any rate it was 6.5 FSL and 7.5 BPEL.

Also what is interobserver variation?
Also I just noticed it mentions that their penis was measured in front of their guardians. This seems kinda weird since having their parents in the room doesn't seem to add anything to the study.

I think that's just at the younger ages, since they don't want their doctors/nurses getting sued later if someone didn't know what was going on and accused them of acting improperly.

Interobserver variation is defined here:
Observer variation definition - Medical Dictionary definitions of popular medical terms easily defined on MedTerms
Interobserver variation is the #1 reason why comparing between studies is so difficult, and why people who line up studies taken in different geographies can't really get conclusive results to say things like 'people from X are longer than people from Y'. It simply means that different people will always have slight differences in their methodology, so you could get one person that consistently measures higher/lower than another.
The RSLmax technique they used in this study (aka bpfsl) is one of their most important findings. Every other technique's variation is too high to be usable for comparison. This is why I titled the thread 'best statistical study for comparing at home', because they document the one technique that you can actually use to reliably compare against a study.

Comparing this to the Ponchietti study, which also measured stretched-length but didn't bone-press, their distribution looks almost identical but the median is about 0.5" inch shorter. 0.5" inch is about 1 standard deviation, which means that's a lot. A standard deviation is the difference between a micropenis and just being on the small side, so medically it's very important to factor that out.
 

bobg4400

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Could that 0.5 inches just be the fatpad since one setof data would be VP and the other NBP?
Also thanks for the link to the explanation, although I've always wondered why researchers hadn't standardised a method before since you'd think the first thing they'd do when collecting data would be to create a standard measuring technique.
 

ShannonH

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Also i'm surprised a micropenis is set at anything below 4.3 inches. While 4.3 inches is small I would never consider it to be a micropenis.
Also it seems to mention that the people are slected based on the fact that they come to the hospital regularly becuae of issues with their penis size or something?
It seems like this would rule out the larger guys who would be more comfortable with themselves and skew the averages downwards?

I am a little surprised by the micropenis result. They do seem to have an exclusion criteria for 'genital abnormalities', which would usually put a subject in to the bottom 3% for length, so saying a 4.3" is a micropenis in this study is like saying 'this is a micropenis if you don't count all the guys we didn't measure because they have a micropenis'. Seems sort of silly.

Where are you reading that those included are coming to a hospital because of issues with their penis? The introduction mentions that knowing what the real sizes are is helpful during consultations with such patients, but they're not the ones chosen for the study. Their criteria is here:
" All patients were selected at the
clinics, consecutively, during regular appointments. All
patients who agreed to take part were included, both healthy
patients and those with diagnoses, none of which were clini-
cally significant to the study. None of them exhibited genital abnormalities."

To me, that sounds like a pretty good cross-sampling of the general population. If anything, I think that skews it upwards because those with genital abnormalities at 18 or who have a smaller penis would be less likely to consent.
 

bobg4400

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I am a little surprised by the micropenis result. They do seem to have an exclusion criteria for 'genital abnormalities', which would usually put a subject in to the bottom 3% for length, so saying a 4.3" is a micropenis in this study is like saying 'this is a micropenis if you don't count all the guys we didn't measure because they have a micropenis'. Seems sort of silly.

Where are you reading that those included are coming to a hospital because of issues with their penis? The introduction mentions that knowing what the real sizes are is helpful during consultations with such patients, but they're not the ones chosen for the study. Their criteria is here:
" All patients were selected at the
clinics, consecutively, during regular appointments. All
patients who agreed to take part were included, both healthy
patients and those with diagnoses, none of which were clini-
cally significant to the study. None of them exhibited genital abnormalities."

To me, that sounds like a pretty good cross-sampling of the general population. If anything, I think that skews it upwards because those with genital abnormalities at 18 or who have a smaller penis would be less likely to consent.

Ignore the thing about the issues, I misread it. When it mentions regular appointments at clinics are those just normal hospitals or something else?

Also I agree with you on the micropenis thing. They shouldn't have bothered mentioning micropenises at all.
 

drabman

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BTW, excellent find Shannon.

You might consider posting it at a site like measurection. It's quite sad to see posts by guys who are suffering unnecessary anguish there and sensible information like this might help some of them.

There do seem to be more and more surveys with halfway credible methodology coming to light. Notwithstanding the issue of interobserver variation already discussed, its noticeable that not a single one ever seems to support the sort of outlandish claims and anecdotal evidence we often see here and elsewhere - i.e the claims of multiple encounters with freakishly huge penises, the assertion that 7" NBP is "not that big" and that 5" is "pretty small".

Given that penises have only "just come out of the closet" so to speak, in the sense that, until the advent of the internet and the onset of a more sexually liberated attitude in most Western societies, few men probably saw another man's erect penis more than once or twice, I'm pretty convinced that one day most men will realise they have nothing to worry about and some of the myths will disappear for good.