YaleCoursesThe Question Is: What Is the Question? | Understanding Medical Research
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The Question Behind The Question 0:00
You are asked to notice that studies often answer a narrower question than the one people assume. A gun show study found that in Nevada, but not California, gun violence spiked two weeks after a gun show. It looks like it says guns are dangerous, but it only really asked whether the time around a gun show, in a state with lax laws, links to violence rates there. Be careful of spin that makes a study sound bigger than it is.
Exposures And Outcomes Explained 3:00
An exposure is anything linked to an outcome, a medication, your age, your gender, or a measurement like cholesterol. Exposures can vary, like cholesterol, or stay fixed, like race or DNA. Varying exposures matter more because changing them might change outcomes. Race itself is not interesting to study, but how doctors treat people differently based on race is, because that can be changed. Outcomes fall into hard ones, birth rates, death rates, and quality of life, and soft ones like income or muscle mass, which mostly matter because they affect the hard outcomes.
Diagrams, Mediators, And Confounders 6:30
Causal diagrams draw the exposure leading to the outcome, like smoking leading to lung cancer through lung damage as a mediator. Confounders are third factors, like wealth explaining why foie gras eaters live longer, not the foie gras itself. In any study, you must identify the exposure and outcome clearly, since one study's exposure can be another's outcome.
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