MILITARY TRAINING NOISE AND HEALTH – METHODOLOGICAL IN ISSUES RESEARCH

摘要

Research viability Considered dispassionately, the viability of fully quantitative and definitiveresearch into the possibility of causal relationships between environmental noise and long termhealth outcomes must be considered doubtful. Even large scale cross-sectional epidemiologymight not be capable of generating definitive results. Future progress depends on thedevelopment of a comprehensive and biologically plausible theory which would be capable ofgenerating research hypotheses which can be tested in separate experiments. No such theoryexists, which means that many researchers are constrained to look for simple associations betweenpotential input and outcome variables which do not really prove anything at all, even if they canbe found. There could be fundamental practical or ethical problems associated with many of thepossible experiments which might be carried out and which could require much ingenuity toovercome. This could mean that the total number of causal relationships which can be establishedwith any certainty might be quite limited.