Ecologic Studies
Subject areas: biology, mathematics, statistics, health education, social science
Grade level: 11th or 12th
Level of difficulty: low to medium
Prerequisite: Basic Knowledge of descriptive epidemiology and the use of a 2x2 table
Summary: Students learn about the ecologic study design, in which the unit of analysis is a population rather than individuals. Working in groups, they use actual data from the 50 United States to examine the relation between the availability of firearms and the incidence of unintentional deaths from firearms. In the course of the lesson they learn about the ecologic fallacy, which is an error in inference that results from drawing a conclusion about individuals from population-level information.
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