Designing a study linking air pollution and lung disease

Scenario:

Congratulations! You just received funding from the EPA to conduct a study to see if there is a link between air pollution and lung disease. As a public health professional, how would you design a study that is not weakened by the ecologic fallacy?

You should include the following considerations in your study design:

â?¢ Definition and measurement of the exposure
â?¢ The outcome
â?¢ Unit of analysis
â?¢ Sample selection

Your study should be in APA format, in-text citation and reference list.
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Solution Preview

To start with, there is already ample research and evidence that there IS a link between air pollution and lung disease so that should help for your beginning. In a quick search, using the Environmental Protection Agency, it would be helpful to see what documented work has already been done, to glean insight about what sort of projects they favored previously and the style that was completed and published.

Next, even with young children, I put some basic props, materials or in this case, ideas, on the table and say, “What questions do you have? ” In the same way that someone would write a murder mystery or CSI TV show, one starts with what you know.
WHO
WHAT
WHEN
WHERE
WHY
HOW
What community or population is compelling to you? Is it easy to access and what would you like to stage as the research foundation?

With regard to “how you would design a study that is not weakened by the ecologic fallacy,?” in a quick review of Wikipedia, this might help you with additional insight, “Aggregated data and the, ‘ecological fallacy,’ cross-sectional studies can contain individual-level data (one record per individual, for example, in national health surveys). However, in …