Reference no: EM133792442

Homework: Individual Epidemiologic Study

For this homework, you will be assigned an article from the peer-reviewed literature that describes an epidemiological study. You will use that article to complete a Critically Assessed Study Article FORM, in which you will provide a summary of the study by explaining the following:

I. Study purpose (This should be a full sentence. Remember, anytime you use the authors' words, you must use quotation marks.)

II. Study design (What study design that is the focus of this exercise??)

III. Describe the source of the data and the study sample

IV. Primary measure (Sometimes there will be more than 1 primary measure. However, for the purposes of this homework, choose just the one that you believe is most important and explain why you made that choice. Remember that for our purposes, a measure is the construct (such as glycemic control, or depression, or tuberculosis) that we are measuring, NOT the instrument (such as a PDQ-9) or lab test (such as the HbA1C test) used to measure it.)

V. Statistical Test used for the primary measure (It should be Odds Ratio). (If it is something else, then you need to contact your instructor.)

VI. Complete the 2x2 table using only the data from the study for the primary measure you were assigned. You will insert the appropriate numbers into the 2x2 table that was used in the study to arrive at the crude (unadjusted) OR reported. (The 2x2 table can be found in the 9th chapter of the textbook, page 254.)

VII. Calculation of the crude (unadjusted) OR. You will put the numbers from the 2x2 table you constructed into the OR formula to show how the resulting OR was derived. (This formula can be found in the 9th chapter of the textbook on page 253.) All of the articles that were chosen for this homework were chosen because they do report the crude (unadjusted) OR for your assigned variables somewhere in the article so you are able to check your table and calculations to ensure that you have come up with the correct number.

VIII. Interpretation of the measure of association for this study. You will explain how the above measure of association is interpreted for this study. The textbook helps you understand how to interpret the OR results.

IX. Discussion of the advantages of using case-control designs. (You can get this from your book.)

X. Discussion of the limitations of using case-control designs. (You can get this from your book.)

XI. Discussion of bias (information and selection biases) and confounding for this particular study. (See example provided.)

XII. Description of any methods used in the study for minimizing bias and confounding, or methods that could have been used, but weren't. (See example provided.)