data collected for that item also when the participation influence factor is adjusted to a high value the standard deviation or amount of agreement among the people who have provided preference data becomes less of a factor in the computation of the confidence in the collected data for the item the participation influence factor can be adjusted to a neutral position which causes the confidence factor to be computed using only the generally accepted calculation for standard error to control the degree to which the participation factor influences the confidence score an additional factor is introduced this u201c adjusted participation factor u201d apf is calculated as follows as is readily observed if the participation influence factor is set to 0 the adjusted participation factor will be 0 and have no influence on the confidence score next the confidence score cs for a particular item is computed 760 the confidence score is a measure of the relative amount of confidence in the statistical mean rating calculated from the data provided by the participants who rated the element it should be noted that the confidence score cannot be computed until at least two participants have rated an element the confidence score is calculated for each element.