Overview of Today 1) Housekeeping 2) Review your journal posts and questions 3) Discussion about numeracy in groups 4) Strategies for navigating uncertainty

Risk: An Interdisciplinary Study Words and ideas that came up in your posts: Statistics Math Equations Perceptions Psychology Emotions Aristotle Case study Study design Grompert’s Theory of Mortality!

Medical Data Interpretation Test “To me, if something states that there is a 99% chance of survival, that seems to be much less risky than a 1% chance of death. Why is this the case, and how is the acknowledgement of this phenomenon used in our world today?” Framing---gain (survival) v. loss (death)

Study Design—When should scientists use which design? Is one study design necessarily more useful or better than the others? And if so, which one and why? Could it also be preferential or circumstantial? How do you decide when to use case-control and when to use cross-sectional? If you wanted to take the lung capacity of 50 different 30 year old women that have smoked versus 50 different 30 year old women that haven’t smoked. Would you use an experimental study or an observational study?

Components of an epidemiological study Population---need to define your population in terms of age, race, SES, etc. ; How many people will you try to recruit? Disease—need a case definition Time frame-How long will you follow people? Study design- How will you collect information? How will you verify information? What resources do you have? We will focus on observational study designs: cohort, case-control, cross-sectional Take EPID 600 if you are interested in this stuff!

Ways to gather information 1.Case study 2.Surveillance—Vital Statistics (Looking at death statistics) 3.Experimental studies (drug testing, randomized control trials, experiments) 4.Observational studies (cohort, case-control and cross-sectional)

Numeracy as a complex concept “It can mean the ability to understand and use numbers, encompassing basic logic and quantitative reasoning skills, or the understanding of where the number comes from and how it is potentially relevant. The four types of numerical reasoning are basic, computational, analytical, and statistical, which shows just how broad the term numeracy is.”

Guides to Developing Numeracy Misleading Communication of Risk: “They stated that some reported a 20% decrease in mortality when in reality the mortality rate really only went from around 5 out of every 1000 women to 4 out of every 1000 women. So even though the statistic is true it can be very misleading.” Think about Absolute versus Relative Risk;

Numeracy—There’s More to the Puzzle! “In order to better comprehend risk, I think the role of emotions, human nature, and the human psyche on a whole must be better examined and understood. After all, if we come to the understanding that the numbers we see (even the reliable ones) don't affect our decisions as much as we thought, there's something missing. And that something should be studied and taught.”

Prompt for Journal Entry 3 ***Be sure to have an engaging title Prompt: We’ve gone through a lot of information in this module about the calculation and measurement of risk in terms of numbers and how to assess their validity. In your prompt, identify 3-5 strategies for processing numbers in scientific, media and government articles. For each strategy, provide some insight as to why it is important for accurately processing risk. In the tag, include the entry Journal entry #3 Comment on 1 of your peers articles (Follow word count and Honor Code guidelines as described for Journal Entry 1)

Some thought experiments

Three foundations are working to rid country X of disease Foundation A: will reduce disease A in country X from 15,000 deaths per year to 5,000 deaths per year Foundation B: will reduce disease B in country X from 290,000 deaths per year to 270,000 deaths per year Foundation C: will reduce disease C in country X from 175,000 deaths to 160,000 deaths per year. Who do you give your money to?

Uncertainty CONFIDENCE INTERVAL OR UNCERTAINTY INTERVAL?

TATECOUNTY/CI.HTML

Confidence in our estimates

Bias in Studies