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Probability Testing: Focus on Families Efficacy

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Probability Testing: Focus on Families Efficacy Probability concepts help public health policymakers determine adequate measures for protecting communities from health threats, especially for interventions that may only have a marginal, but significant positive benefit. To use an obvious example, implementing adequate storm drainage systems for urban areas will differ considerably between rainy Florida and the arid Arizona desert. Although flooding does occur during the monsoon season in the Sonoran Desert, the storms last an hour or two at most, thereby giving the drainage systems time to recover before the next storm. Rarely do such storms cause problems; however, if the storms that frequent Florida were to make their way to the Arizona desert, devastation would result. For example, 1.5 inches of rain over a few hours taxed the drainage system in an Arizona desert town (Chan, 2012), but it took 22 inches of rain to cause similar problems in a Florida town (Pacheco, 2009). The above example seems to require only a healthy dose of common sense to establish urban planning policy, but in reality probability concepts likely played a critical role in determining how to manage storm runoff for each town. The historical amounts of rainfall for each area would have been analyzed to determine how best to manage deluges to prevent health threats, thereby generating predictions of future rainfall events based on probability concepts. Basing such decision on instinct alone might

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