Dangers with healthy psychology of using epidemiological methods

Posted by Winnie Melda on November 30th, 2018

 Dangers in using invalid data- There are restriction in obtaining data especially during emergencies and as such hinder the use of epidemiological tool in health psychology (Kleinbaum et al., 1982).

Dangers of rapid change in health and nutritional status of many emergency affected population-There is a high possibility of having outdated  recommendation as well as the conclusion of derived from an analysis from collected  data and the analysis of the data  due to rapid changes in the status of the affected population (Kleinbaum et al., 1982).

Dangers in evaluation of programme – Policy makers often expect that individual interventions demonstrate an “impact” on health that is traceable to interventions only. This is often nearly impossible to achieve without complicated and very expensive studies as there different factors that simultaneously affect a particular health outcome or indicator (Kleinbaum et al., 1982).

Danger of ignorance of epidemiologic methods- There is often ignorance of data gathered by epidemiologic methods  as major decisions during humanitarian relief are not made on the basis of data or evidence; concerns in politics, limitation in resources, personal priorities as well as public relations result into irrational policy or programme decisions (Kleinbaum et al., 1982).

Problems of health psychologist following too closely the epidemiological methods

In trying to create a balance between the weaknesses and the strengths of epidemiological methodology requires a wide range of human exposure especially when obtaining observational data thus creating major weaknesses which is inability to offer conclusive proof of the disease exposure. Thus use of epidemiological method means the constant of further studies to obtain convincing evidence and in most cases the final proof may not get obtained. This inconclusiveness may mean that health interventions may get undertaken and result to elimination of the disease before the workers in the laboratory have a chance to point out important issues that may lead to reoccurrence of the disease (Kleinbaum et al., 1982).

Reference

Kleinbaum, D. G., Kupper, L. L., & Morgenstern, H. (1982). Epidemiologic research: principles and quantitative methods. John Wiley & Sons.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in college research papers if you need a similar paper you can place your order for order research paper.