The Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory [ 28, 29] specifically excludes measures of self-poisoning.
We excluded measures of quality of life, satisfaction, mortality, hospital admissions, process of care or clinical parameters that were not surrogates of the course of disease.
We should have excluded measures of early life experiences as well on this basis, however to ensure we had adjusted for environmental differences during growth we also included leg length and seated height in one of the models.
We excluded measures of psychological or clinical variables which did not provide a direct assessment of health or quality of life, such as self-management behaviour, self-efficacy, HbA1C or forced expiratory volume (FEV), as these are likely to be unreliable indicators of health related quality of life [ 19].
Also because of the independent association found in our study and other studies [ 4, 12, 14, 15] between physical activity or CRF and HRQOL, studies investigating the role of BMI level on HRQOL should not exclude measures of physical activity or CRF.
In a multivariate analysis (reported in the text below) that excluded measures of prior health system contact, the odds of being diagnosed with stage III/IV disease were 76% higher (OR=1.76; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] 1.37 – 2.28; p < 0.0001) for patients with previously undiagnosed diabetes (compared to previously diagnosed diabetes).
Moreover, they are more likely to be independent from the business cycle, hence this exercise allows us to test the robustness of the results to excluding measures more suspicious of suffering from endogeneity (see the discussion in Sect. 2.3).
Given the large number of excluded measures, it is acknowledged that some of those measures might have environmental effects as well.
The issue is that if the Tef is not based on a systematic view of high-quality teaching, then there is no basis on which to include or exclude potential measures of excellence.
4We define employment dynamics as gross worker flows, gross job flows, and job-to-job flows, and therefore exclude other measures of employment transitions that have also exhibited declines.
