HD FS 258 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Randomized Controlled Trial, Causal Inference, Headache
17 Feb 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Etiology = the study of multiple causes of an adverse outcome: biological, psychological, environmental. Hume"s counterfactual model: we may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed : a factual is this caused that. Me kicking the ball caused the window to break. We can observe this and use our 5 senses to know this: a counterfactual is something that didn"t happen. We would expect not: underlies everything that we do in science. Randomized clinical trial: group of people that we think are relevant for our study. To study effectiveness of tylenol: 1,000 eligible participants to have a headache. Assign one group to take tylenol and one to take a placebo.
