Analytical Epidemiology in Public Health

Abstract

Since the public health epidemiologist focuses on determinants of disease or ways of preventing diseases, an experimental study is often not an option for ethical reasons, although it may be possible to remove an exposure in a randomized trial on, e.g., smoking cessation. The public health epidemiologist will need to know more about non-experimental design options and how to use available data for research. The public health epidemiologist will often use secondary data (data generated for a different purpose, like death certificates, existing monitoring data of air pollution, employment roosters), and he or she will have to be familiar with how the data were generated and the limitations that may imply.