Normalization Process

  1. Let there be 3 categories with un-normalized relative risks of 3, 2 and 1.
  2. For each category, determine the proportion of the population that falls into it. For instance, let the distribution be 0.4 : 0.2 : 0.4
  3. The proportion for each category was then multiplied by the relative risks to get 1.2 : 0.4 : 0.4
  4. Summing these numbers gets 2. This is the expected value of the relative risk if the risks are not normalized.
  5. Thus, to get to the normalized risk, the risks are divided by 2.
  6. The final relative risk is thus 1.5, 1 and 0.5.