Measurement of Health in Epidemiology

This course addresses the measurement of epidemiological variables, which broadly encompasses the tasks involved in obtaining data, without which analyses cannot proceed. Course topics to be discussed include: defining the concepts of exposure, disease, and health; approaches to measuring exposures, which may be personal (i.e., psychological, behavioral, biological, or genetic) or environmental (i.e., physical, chemical, social, or organizational); approaches to measuring disease and health status; assessing the validity and reliability of measurement instruments; problems of misclassification of exposure status and disease status; missing data; instrument (e.g., questionnaire) development; and qualitative methods.