Joseph Olson

and 4 more

Background: In applied psychophysiology, bootstrapping procedures are often used to classify individuals into one of two or more independent states (e.g., high risk vs low risk). Although the number of iterations required for a reliable bootstrap test is not universally agreed upon, some research (Rosenfeld et al., 2017b) suggests that 100 iterations is a sufficient number to obtain reliable results when analyzing P300 from a concealed information test. However, no study to-date has evaluated the diagnostic consistency of the 100 iterations test across repeated examinations. Methods: We evaluated the precision of the 100 iteration test by repeating the test 100 times per participant in a sample of 81 participants. The test was designed to classify participants as either knowledgeable or not knowledgeable of critical information related to a mock crime. Results: We found that the test provided variable classifications in approximately a quarter of our sample (n = 19/81 or 23%), specifically when a participant’s score presented near the diagnostic cutpoint. Moreover, the test’s diagnostic results varied by as much as +/-15%, in certain cases. Conclusion: Although the test provided reliable results for the majority of our sample, this was not true for a notable number of cases. We recommend that researchers report the variability of their diagnostic metrics and integrate this variability when classifying individuals. We discuss several simple examples of how to take variability into account when making classifications, such as by calculating the probability of one classification state over another given the data.