PROPOSAL DEVELOPMENT

IN ENVIRONMENTAL
EPIDEMIOLOGY RESEARCH
Five steps in developing a proposal
1. Identifying a research topic
2. Conducting a leterature review
3. Specifying a research question
4. Formulating an hypothesis
5. Selecting a study design
Step 1. Identifying a research topic
• Before study planning can begin, one
must first identify a research topic of
interest.
• Community concern and personal
commitment should be the most
important factors dictating the
choice of a research topic.
• Researchers will generally choose
topics on which they already have a
good deal of background knowledge,
ensuring that they are well-prepared
for a detailed examination of the
problem and its associated issues
• If a new topic is chosen for
investigation, researchers must take
the extra time to become familiar
with the topic, enabling them to be
comfortable with key concepts and
issues..
Step 2.Conducting a leterature review
• Once a research topic has been identified,
even researchers with experience on the topic
should conduct a formal literature review to
become familiar with the body of current and
historical scientific literature already in
existence.
• A literature review is a methodologically
conducted review of published academic
reports in peer-reviewed journals.
 Several methods to conduct
literature review
1. The most efficient way may be to use one or
several of the modern computerized
databases cataloguing current research.
2. Online databases such as Medline, PubMed,
or the Cochrane Library can be very useful for
quickly scanning the published literature and
locating pertinent basic science and review
articles.
Obstacles: payment ?????
• To combat this problem, the World Health
Organization (WHO) is now providing free
internet access to many key public health and
scientific journals. More information on this
initiative is also available in Toolkit№1: Useful
Epidemiology and Public Health Websites
and Online Resources.
3. Communicating with researchers and
agencies that have experience in studying the
research topic of interest may also be a useful
method for obtaining more information on a
study topic, including unpublished or
internally published results and subjective
impressions (so called“grey literature”).
 Step 3. Specifying a research question
An appropriate research question should satisfy several
criteria, including:
1) Being of some importance and relevance to the
community
2) Having implications for improving or maintaining
public health
3) Being scientifically important, relevant and
original
4) Being sufficiently specific and practical to be
answerable through available epidemiological
methods and resources
Importance and relevance to community

• Epidemiological research should focus on

questions that have some interest or
relevance to the communities in which they
are based.
• Issues of community importance may be
identified through personal experience or
through contact with stakeholders, including:
health care professionals, policy makers,
citizen groups, and in some cases, the media.
Implications for improving or maintaining
public health:
• In keeping with the mission of epidemiology,
epidemiological research should be conducted with
the intent of maintaining or improving health in
human populations.
• This does not necessarily mean that the findings of a
study must result in immediate human health
benefits, but that, either directly or indirectly, the
results of the research should contribute to
understanding exposure-disease relationships and/or
discovering methods of promoting human health.
• In fact, most epidemiological research is an
attempt to address health concerns or to
investigate health problems afflicting human
populations. whether the causes of these
problems are known or not.
• Epidemiologists need not focus only on
potential risk factors, but may also choose to
study protective factors (those exposures
which promote or improve some aspect(s) of
human health).
Being scientifically important, relevant and
original:
• The next criterion, that the research question has
scientific importance, relevance, and originality
may be the most important for producing findings
that will be recognized as a useful contribution to
the field.
• It is important to choose research questions that
can contribute to scientific knowledge because
success in a research career depends on the
production of novel and meaningful research
findings.
• A good scientific study will produce findings
that will contribute new information to the
body of scientific knowledge on certain topics.
Sufficiently specific and practical
• A research question must be sufficiently
specific and practical to be answered within
the confines of a study having limited
resources
Step 4. Formulating an hypothesis
• A careful and critical review of the literature (See Section
1.2) is needed to enable the researcher to formulate an
hypothesis
• A good epidemiological research hypothesis will identify five
major points:
1) The study population(s)
2) The risk factor(s) being studied (exposures and
confounders)
3) The health outcome(s) being studied
4) The time period(s) being studied
5) The relationship being studied