Measuring Effectiveness
Research in injury prevention is challenging, because the usual outcome of interest is deaths or injuries prevented, and it is nearly impossible to measure how many people did not get hurt who otherwise would have. Education efforts can be measured by changes in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, before and after the intervention, however tying these changes back into reductions in morbidity and mortality is often problematic.
Examining trends in morbidity and mortality in the population is usually not difficult and may provide some indication of the effectiveness of injury prevention interventions. However, this approach suffers from the potential of ecological fallacy, where the data shows an association between an intervention and a change in the outcome, but there is actually no causal relationship.
Read more about this topic: Injury Prevention
Famous quotes containing the word measuring:
“As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea’s foot and marveling at a midge’s humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)