Making Sense of Data

This manual aims to provide readers with the epidemiological concepts and skills needed to appraise published reports as well as their own findings. It considers applications in clinical medicine, research, public health, and community medicine. The book consists of a series of short exercises, explanatory text, and self-tests, designed to produce competence in data interpretation. Enough explanations, notes, and definitions are included to minimize the need to refer to other books. The five sections cover: basic concepts and procedures for appraising data, starting with single tables and diagrams, and the uses of epidemiological data; rates and other simple measures used in epidemiology; accuracy and how inaccurate measures can bias results; appraising the associations between variables; and the appraisal of cause-effect relationships and ways of measuring the impact of causal factors. Epidemiologists, health professionals in public health and community medicine.