Key Terms
A diagram of proposed causal linkages among a set of concepts believed to be related to a particular public health problem.
What is a conceptual model?
This study design follows a group of people over time to measure the development of disease.
What is a cohort study?
This ethical principle involves doing no harm to participants during the research process
What is non-maleficence?
This type of bias happens when the association between exposure and outcome is different for those who complete the study and those in the target population.
What is selection bias?
The strength of the association between an exposure and disease differs according to the level of another variable.
What is effect measure modification?
In this study design, participants are selected based on their disease status (diseased vs. non-diseased)
What is a case-control study?
An ethical principle that requires researchers to ensure that the benefits of a study outweigh its risk.
What is beneficence?
In this type of bias, the measurement of the exposure or outcome is inaccurate, often because of systematic errors in data collection or reporting.
What is information bias?
The acronym used to describe characteristics of a good research question.
What is FINER (feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, relevant)?
This is a study design that tests the effectiveness of a new drug or intervention.
What is a randomized controlled trial?
This ethical principle ensures that the burdens and benefits of research are fairly distributed.
What is justice?
This tool/visual diagram can be used to identify confounding?
What is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)?
The study of knowledge construction and ways of knowing.
What is epistemology?
A study design that observes a population at a single point in time to assess disease prevalence.
What is a cross-sectional study?
This committee ensures the ethical conduct of research by reviewing study protocols to ensure the protection of human participants.
What is an Institutional Review Board?
This term refers to the degree to which the results of a study can be generalized to populations beyond the specific study sample.
What is external validity?
This statistic is used to measure the strength of the association between an exposure and an outcome, specifically the ratio of the odds of the outcome occurring in the exposed group compared to the unexposed group.
What is odds ratio?
A study design in which participants are not randomly assigned to groups and instead are observed based on their exposure status.
What is an observational study?
This infamous study, conducted by the US Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972, involved withholding treatment from African American men with syphilis, even after penicillin became the standard treatment, violating principles of informed consent and causing unnecessary harm.
What is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?
This is a term used in DAGs to name confounding pathways.
What is a backdoor pathway?