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Essay on Health Psychology
This report concentrates on epidemiological studies of the association between alcohol consumption and ill health in human populations. It will be useful then to give some account of what epidemiology is, and the nature and limitations of the most commonly used epidemiological methods.
Modern epidemiology developed from the study of epidemics of infectious disease, although nowadays epidemiological methods are also employed in the study of non-infectious disease. Epidemiological studies are based on the idea of observing population processes, rather than intervening directly in individual cases, other than perhaps as part of a general diagnostic or screening procedure, So, while most people are familiar with the experimental method in science, in which researchers manipulate aspects of the environment and observe the consequences of such manipulation, this is not the approach of epidemiology. The reasons for this relate to feasibility, and moral and ethical questions. It is clearly immoral to experiment on individuals with possibly harmful substances to assess whether they are harmful or not. Epidemiologists have neither the desire nor the opportunity to assign people randomly to exposure to possibly dangerous environmental, chemical, nutritional or other agents. (Farewell V.T, 1979)
One possible method of investigating the association between exposure to a possible risk factor and the occurrence of an illness is to select a random group of individuals from the population for investigation. In a cross-sectional study, the individuals are assessed for the presence or absence of the illness in question and a number of potential risk factors at the time of the investigation. If the respondents are followed up over a period of time subsequent to the start of the study, we call the design a longitudinal or prospective study. In studies of this kind, the outcome of interest may simply be the total number of individuals with the illness at the end of the study, or the time taken for each individual to develop the illness......................
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