Epidemiology

Kenneth J. Rothman

Begins with a brief, lucid discussion of casual thinking and causal inference and then takes the reader through the elements of epidemiology, focusing on the measures of disease occurrence and causal effects. With these building blocks in place, the reader learns how to design, analyze, and interpret epidemiologic research studies, and how to deal with the fundamental problems that epidemiologists face, including confounding, the role of chance, and the exploration of interactions. All these topics are layered on the foundation of basic principles presented in simple language, with numerous examples and questions for further thought.