Epidemiological Research: Terms and Concepts

The book is organized so as to address in separate sections first the preparatory topics of medicine (clinical and epidemiological), science in general, and statistics (mathematical); then topics of epidemiological research proper; and, finally, topics of ¿meta-epidemiological¿ clinical research. In those two main sections, a further grouping is based on the distraction between objects and methods of study. In this framework, the particular topics are addressed both descriptively and quasi-prescriptively, commonly with a number of explicatory annotations. This book is intended to serve as a handbook for whomever is, in whatever way, concerned with epidemiological or ¿meta-epidemiological¿ clinical research. But besides this, it is also intended to serve as a textbook for students in introductory courses on ¿epidemiological¿ research ¿ to which end there is a suggested hierarchy of the concepts that might reasonably be covered.