Essay-critical appraisal Assessment 3

Assessment description:

Assignment 3 will involve students choosing a peer-reviewed journal article from public health discipline. Students will need to provide an overview of the paper related to the rationale, research questions and methods used what were the main results and their own general conclusion of the paper. Following their overview they need to assess the extent to which there is a causal association between the main exposure and outcome applying the process associate with judging the internal validity; whether the design support causality, the source of errors that reduce confidence in the validity of causal association versus sources that support causality and last you expect to judge the external validity of the study. 

You will be assessed on the following: 

• –  Your ability to provide concise, accurate and original overview of the paper using terminology used in the unit 
• –  Your ability to critically appraise an observed association between an exposure and an outcome using epidemi- ological concepts (e.g. what measures of associations were used, how strong and precise, what source of errors 

presented in this study with examples) 

• –  Your ability to assess the possibility of observed causation using the methods we learnt in class 
• –  Your ability to contextualized your essay with references from the most recent literature and not from the paper 

you read 

• –  Your ability to appraise the generalizability of the study outcome to other populations 
• –  Your ability to independently discuss the paper as a reviewer (i.e., not repeating the authors’ impression but  rather express your view s of the study they conducted).