Description
This book was conceived as an intermediate epidemiology textbook. Similarly to the first and second editions, the third edition explores and discusses key epidemiologic concepts and basic methods in more depth than that found in basic textbooks on epidemiology. For the third edition, new examples and exercises have been added to all chapters. In Chapters 7 and 10, respectively, we included discussions of novel epidemiologic strategies for handling confounding (i.e., instrumental variables and propensity scores) and of decision tree as a decision-making tool.
As an intermediate methods text, this book is expected to have a heterogeneous readership. Epidemiology students may wish to use it as a bridge between basic and more advanced epidemiologic methods. Other readers may desire to advance their knowledge beyond basic epidemiologic principles and methods but are not statistically minded and are thus reluctant to tackle the many excellent textbooks that strongly focus on epidemiology’s quantitative aspects. The demonstration of several epidemiologic concepts and methods needs to rely on statistical formulations, and this text extensively supports these formulations with real-life examples, hopefully making their logic intuitively easier to follow. The practicing epidemiologist may find selected portions of this book useful for an understanding of concepts beyond the basics. Thus, the common denominators for the intended readers are familiarity with the basic strategies of analytic epidemiology and a desire to increase their level of understanding of several notions that are insufficiently covered (and naturally so) in many basic textbooks. The way in which this textbook is organized makes this readily apparent.