Why is there so much emphasis placed on the comparison of methods experiment?
Probably because this experiment uses real patient samples and reveals the kind of errors that will be encountered when the tests are used for patient care, which is particularly important when a laboratory changes methods. It also reveals different kinds of errors – proportional systematic, constant systematic, random error between methods – therefore providing a lot of quantitative information about method performance. Some of the other experiments seem to test conditions that may not be observed very often – e.g., interference, recovery, and detection limit.
