Table 2 Descriptive Results for Agreement / Disagreement with the Main Outcome, “I do not like the location of my surgical scar” (Q12). This table presents the basic descriptive results to this survey question. In the left-hand column, study groups are written in bold; beneath them are the answer options of the survey. The further columns present the n, the %, and the bootstrapped 95% Confidence Interval of the % of respondents. [Recall: in simple terms, the 95% CI represents how much the results might have been different in other hypothetical study samples. If we were to repeat this survey 1000 times in different study samples drawn from the same population, then the results of 950 of those surveys would be somewhere within the 95% CI. The other 50 surveys would be outside the 95% CI (25 would be even lower and the other 25 would be even higher). So for example: in our survey, 20% of the lumpectomy-only patients agreed strongly. If we repeated this survey 1000 times with different women drawn from the same population, we would expect that the results from 950 of those 1000 surveys would be somewhere between 15 and 25% of the lumpectomy-only patients agreeing strongly, as shown in the table. Twenty-five surveys would be even less than 15%, and twenty-five surveys would be even higher than 25%. Expressed another way, we might say that this specific result – that 20% of lumpectomy-only patients agreed strongly – has a margin of error of ±5% of the respondents.]

From: How do breast cancer surgery scars impact survivorship? Findings from a nationwide survey in the United States