Saturday, November 20, 2010

Cause and Effect in Population

One of the interesting concepts that we have not talked about was cause and effect in population. According to Epstein, cause and effect in population is when given the cause, there's a higher probability that the effect will follow than if there were not the cause. There are three kinds of ways to find evidence. First way is through a controlled experiment. In a controlled experiment there is one group that is administered the cause and one who is not, which is called the control group. Another way to find evidence is through an uncontrolled experiment: cause to effect. In this case we start from a suspected cause and see if the effect follows. The last way is an uncontrolled experiment from effect to cause. In this experiment we start with the effect in the population and try to account for how it got there. The example the book used was on smoking cigarettes.

1 comment:

  1. This area was interesting to me as well. It’s not enough in any research paper to say that one thing cause another. We are expected to support our arguments and ideas with verifiable data. This is really important when developing a thesis. This section was really informative, because (as you pointed out) it provides a detailed explanation of the three ways we can find supporting evidence. You did a good job of explaining the various types of experiments and how the data is obtained. The controlled group seems to be the one most used, but I can see the benefit in using the uncontrolled as a way to find a ‘common thread’.

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