Public health triangulation: approach and application to synthesizing data to understand national and local HIV epidemics

BMC Public Health

Correspondence

Karen White¹  Rand L Stoneburner¹  Stephanie Taché¹  Hilary Spindler¹  George W Rutherford²  Nathan Smith³  William McFarland⁴  Sadhna V Patel⁵  John Aberle-Grasse⁵  Keith Sabin⁶  Jesus M Calleja-Garcia⁷ 

[1] Global Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA;Global Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA;ST: Institut für Allgemein-, Familien- und Präventivmedizin, Paracelsus Medizinishce Privatuniversität, Salzburg, Austria, and RLS: the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS in Geneva, Switzerland;Global Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA;the Public Health Prevention Service, Epidemiology Program Office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;Global Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA;the San Francisco Department of Public Health, San Francisco, California, USA;the Global AIDS Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;the Global AIDS Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;the HIV/AIDS Division, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland;the HIV/AIDS Division, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland;

关键词: Male Circumcision;    Sexual Debut;    Antenatal Clinic;    Multiple Data Source;    Public Health Action;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-10-447

 received in 2010-03-21, accepted in 2010-07-29,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPublic health triangulation is a process for reviewing, synthesising and interpreting secondary data from multiple sources that bear on the same question to make public health decisions. It can be used to understand the dynamics of HIV transmission and to measure the impact of public health programs. While traditional intervention research and metaanalysis would be ideal sources of information for public health decision making, they are infrequently available, and often decisions can be based only on surveillance and survey data.MethodsThe process involves examination of a wide variety of data sources and both biological, behavioral and program data and seeks input from stakeholders to formulate meaningful public health questions. Finally and most importantly, it uses the results to inform public health decision-making. There are 12 discrete steps in the triangulation process, which included identification and assessment of key questions, identification of data sources, refining questions, gathering data and reports, assessing the quality of those data and reports, formulating hypotheses to explain trends in the data, corroborating or refining working hypotheses, drawing conclusions, communicating results and recommendations and taking public health action.ResultsTriangulation can be limited by the quality of the original data, the potentials for ecological fallacy and "data dredging" and reproducibility of results.ConclusionsNonetheless, we believe that public health triangulation allows for the interpretation of data sets that cannot be analyzed using meta-analysis and can be a helpful adjunct to surveillance, to formal public health intervention research and to monitoring and evaluation, which in turn lead to improved national strategic planning and resource allocation.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Rutherford et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010