26 November 2009

The Lancet: Health and Climate Series of 6 articles

The Lancet has published six important articles on climate change and health today.

All the articles are open access see below. Register on the site and check out the other open access materials on the site.

Click here to go to The Lancet Health and Climate Change Series

See also the:

Energy and Health series
Managing the Health effects of Climate Change

Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: household energy
Summary
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: urban land transport
Summary
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: low-carbon electricity generation
Summary
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: food and agriculture
Summary
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: health implications of short-lived greenhouse pollutants
Summary
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers
Summary

4 November 2009

Vagaries of counting

There always been an issue about whether quantifying is as inherently subjective as qualitative data.

A recent article titled 'On quantitizing' is worth a read. The writing is quite sociological postmodern at times but the examples on page 4 and 5 are insightful.

It argues that quantifying social data hides a lot of subjective judgements by respondents and researchers that need unpicking to fully realise what quantitative information has been captured.

One study on women's experiences of unplanned cesarean births asked them to sum up their their experience on a scale from 0=bad to 10=good. In the study no one rated their experience as 0 even though some women had just finished narrating highly negative stories about their birth experiences. One woman explicitly stated "I wouldn't put myself at 0."

Similarly in a study using two rating systems to assess perceptions of success in life, one from 0=not at all successful to 10= extremely successful and the other -5=not at all successful to 5=extremely successful. 34% o respondents chose a value between -5 and 0 while only 13% chose a value (in the formally equivalent scale) between 0 and 5 on the 0-10 point scale. According to the study author when 'not at all successful' was attached to 0 respondents took this to mean absence of outstanding achievements while when it was attached to -5 with 0 as midpoint they interpreted this as 'presence of failures'.


For me this has implications for evaluating health and wellbeing status using questionnaires when measuring the benefits of environmental and social interventions.

Source:
On Quantitizing
Margarete Sandelowski, Corrine I. Voils, and George Knafl
J Mix Methods Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 October 27.
PMCID: PMC2768355
Published in final edited form as:
J Mix Methods Res.2009 July 1; 3(3): 208–222. doi: 10.1177/1558689809334210.

Image courtesy of Darren Hester on Flickr