I am working on a translation for an acquaintance, and a very literal translation of the phrase in question would go something like “We studied and investigated the range of motion and scores for each cohort backwards.”
Does anyone have a sense of what is meant by “backwards” in this context? What would be the proper term?
The relevant portion of the original in Japanese is: “…スコアを後ろ向きに調査し検討した.”
On further thought, I wonder if it refers to selecting the subjects and their scores for inclusion in the study after their procedures were completed? In other words, that a study was made of completed cases, rather than selecting patients to be enrolled in the study prior to their treatment?
In any case, if “backwards” in this case has that meaning or some other, an example of the correct terminology in English would be appreciated.
I don’t speak Japanese, but since you use the word “cohort” that implies they followed these people through time, and therefore “backwards” would mean they analyzed the scores with time reversed - which would mean score vs. age, backwards through time. On the other hand, if they selected the cohort after the tests the appropriate term would be a posteriori… From the information in the OP, I can’t distinguish between the two possibilities.
My use of “cohort” here would be a case of me misusing a word that had a more nuanced meaning than I was aware of…“group” would probably be better than “cohort” in this case, since I don’t think there is an element of following a group through time. So at the very least, thanks for tipping me off to that!
I am only working with an abstract, so I do not have a lot of detail, but it concerns the effect of types of preop pain on postoperative results in orthopedic surgery. A strict reading of the original reveals it was a study of patients who had surgery, so I think it looking at their results after the fact. It is probably in this sense that the Japanese for “backwards” is being used.
It sounds to me like the appropriate translation may be “retrospective”. In epidemiology, a retrospective study is one where you are analyzing events that happened in the past. So, any study of medical records is retrospective.
Agreed, studying data that’s already been collected is retrospective research.
Thanks, everyone! I went with retrospective.