Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interventions
- 3 Evaluating an intervention
- 4 Randomized designs
- 5 Nonrandomized studies
- 6 Statistical analysis of intervention trials
- 7 Methods for adjusting for baseline differences between treatment groups
- 8 Time series analysis
- 9 Special topics
- 10 Research to action
- 11 Conclusion
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interventions
- 3 Evaluating an intervention
- 4 Randomized designs
- 5 Nonrandomized studies
- 6 Statistical analysis of intervention trials
- 7 Methods for adjusting for baseline differences between treatment groups
- 8 Time series analysis
- 9 Special topics
- 10 Research to action
- 11 Conclusion
- Index
Summary
My experience as a public health director has taught me that solving complex health problems requires identifying useful interventions. This book is my intervention to make it easier (and more fun) to conduct intervention studies.
Many different types of interventions can improve health and health care, including drugs and medical devices, laws and changes in medical and organizational practices. To enable you to evaluate a wide range of interventions, this book explains the advantages and disadvantages of many different approaches: randomized and nonrandomized studies; prospective and retrospective studies; planned clinical trials and observational studies (e.g., studies using administrative databases, disease registries); evaluations of investigator-initiated interventions as well as evaluations of interventions created by others (e.g., a law or a system change).
By covering both study design and statistical analysis in one book I hope to save you from having to go back and forth between a textbook on study design and one on statistics. Also, for many intervention studies, especially nonrandomized designs, understanding the statistical approach to analyzing the data is key to judging the robustness of the design. Within the statistics section I have organized the material the way that researchers think: what is the best test to perform to answer a particular question? For readers who wish to learn more about particular tests (e.g., McNemar test, mixed-effects model) I have provided references in the footnotes.
To illustrate the points in this book, I have included many examples from the medical and public health literature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Evaluating Clinical and Public Health InterventionsA Practical Guide to Study Design and Statistics, pp. xi - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010