Ecologic Studies

["R. William Field" <bill-field@uiowa.edu>]

Dr. Dukelow,

I have ordered Mr. King's book describing reconstructing individual
behavior and look forward to discussing it with you in the near future.  I
feel interchange between disciplines is healthy.  After all, the first
person to describe ecologic bias was a sociologist, not an epidemiologist.

Best Regards, Bill Field
bill-field@uiowa.edu

At 10:32 PM 3/3/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Professor Field, the BEIR VI committee, and Greenland and Morgenstern  
>might profit from reading Gary King's book, _A Solution to the 
>Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from 
>Aggregate Data_, Princeton University Press, 1997.  King, a professor 
>of government at Harvard University, received the American Political 
>Science Association's Gosnell Award for the "best methodological work 
>in political science in 1995-96" for the work described in his book.  
>
>Actually, I am told that the bulk of the BEIR VI committee deferred to 
>the three epidemiologists with regard to Cohen's study and that the 
>report considers Cohen's study and others in an appendix, but does not 
>contain any substantive refutation of the study, but rather just a 
>restatement of the epidemiologist's assertion that it is flawed.  That 
>characterization is hearsay, since I have not seen the full report (I 
>can't decide whether to pop for the $45 or so the NAS is charging).
>
>Ecological inference is an example of what mathematicians call an 
>inverse problem.  Inverse problems are usually ill-posed and require 
>additional regularizing assumptions to enable a unique solution.  
>Although difficult to solve, inverse problems are important in a wide 
>variety of applications, and are routinely solved in those areas: 
>tomography, seismography, certain types of non-destructive examination 
>techniques in materials science, and maximum likelihood estimation in 
>statistics.  Rather than use the information in large ecological data 
>sets, some epidemiologists prefer to chant "It's only an ecological 
>study, therefore we don't have to ...".
>
>I'll be happy to email anyone interested a preprint of the review I 
>wrote of King's book, which appeared in the November 1997 issue of 
>Health Physics.
>
>Best regards.
>
>Jim Dukelow
>Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 
>Richland, WA
>js_dukelow@pnl.gov
>
>These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my 
>management or by the U.S. Department of Energy. 
>