Generalizing about Public Health Interventions: A Mixed-Methods Approach to External Validity

Re-Conceptualising Public Health Interventions in Government: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Commentary on "Generalizing About Univariate Forecasting Methods"

Fildes, Hibon, Makridakis and Meade (1998), which will be referred to as FHMM, extends two important published papers. The idea of taking findings from each study and testing them against the data used in the other study is a good one. Such replications and extensions are important in the effort to develop useful generalizations and publication of this paper reflects the commitment of Internati...

Stair-use interventions in worksites and public settings - a systematic review of effectiveness and external validity.

OBJECTIVE We performed a literature review with the main aims to propose an updated overview of the effectiveness of stair-use interventions and to determine the most effective type of intervention. METHODS We systematically searched stair-use interventions performed in worksites or public settings, published up to mid 2013. We used a harvest plot approach to visualize the findings in additio...

Cost-effectiveness of public health interventions - a new methodological approach

Background The goal of public health interventions is to move the distribution of life style risk factors in a healthier direction to decrease disability-causing disease and improve quality of life in the population. We recently presented a novel method to estimate the population-level impact of a public health intervention, using changes in the distribution curve of the outcome of interest. Th...

External Validity and Transportability: A Formal Approach

We provide a formal definition of the notion of “transportability,” or “external validity,” as a license to transfer causal information from experimental studies to a different population in which only observational studies can be conducted. We introduce a formal representation called “selection diagrams” for expressing differences and commonalities between populations of interest and, using th...