Similarities and differences concerning students' views about ID were as pronounced and notable in the "within" as in the "between" institutional comparisons (above): 49% of RWU or 23% of PC responders (means biology majors + nonmajors) had no opinion about ID (Fig. 8a, b, choice A).
Over recent years the use of the funnel plot to display SMRs graphically has been advocated as the standard method for institutional comparisons using cross-sectional data [ 4- 9].
Whilst this rigidity facilitates institutional comparisons, something that is not necessarily objectionable, it does so to such a degree that we have become encouraged to produce league tables.
Our method, which includes three indicators that are as far as possible standardized, may also be suitable for use in other institutions, and might even facilitate inter-institutional comparison of incidence rates in special patient groups or in all patients.
While building upon this approach and extending it to the prison context, which is surprisingly absent from the cross-institutional comparison by Bowen and his colleagues, this article suggests a more fine-grained analysis, by bringing into the play the role of subnational contexts characterized by varying actor configurations.
For inter-institutional comparison of incidences it is important to calculate the rates of possible and probable nosocomial cases.
At present inter-institutional comparison of results is difficult because several different normalization factors for FDG uptake are in use.
Finally, we conducted a multi-institutional comparison of expected and observed values for the dependent variables from both regression models in 133 hospitals.
This uniformity provided a basis for cross-institutional comparison and learning similar to that experienced by Mirzoev et al. when performing HSR capacity assessments across a different set of African SPHs [ 19].
Further, patient severity measures should be included in appropriate risk-adjustment of benchmark measures used for inter-institutional comparison of hospital performance and resource use to ensure that hospitals which care for very severely ill children ab initio, or on inter-hospital transfer, are not penalized for doing so, by policy-makers and insurance payers.
