Question

If you were going to design an experiment on the effects of air pollution, how would you account for the effects that variations in health, gender, age, and ethnicity can cause?

If you were going to measure whether two groups differ in a genetic predisposition to heart disease, stroke, or hypertension, how would you make sure that difference in air pollution levels experienced by the two groups didn't confound your results?

Answer 1

For designing an experiment on effects of air pollution, i would proceed by taking various test subjects i.e, people who are going to volunteer for the study and then divide them to study according to the following criteria mentioned :-

1. health - to estimate the effects of air pollution caused by health of an indiviual, our main source or point of pollution cause would be ejection of harmful bacteria or viruses which in this case would serve as pollutants for air in forms of sneezes and coughing.

2. gender - taking a lot of test subjects, this criteria is more of a psychological study, where simply we would observe how much people from each gender have contributed to pollution causing activities, for example, number of men/women smoking regularly is a factor in this case.

3. age - an experiment similar to the one stated above can be performed for this criteria by simply dividing people in different age groups rather than their gender.

4. ethnicity - in my opinion, this criteria has no role to play or should not be considered for this study as it would not provide an authentic result to why air pollution is caused by this factor.

moreover, if two groups differ in genetic predisposition to heart disease, stroke, hypertension, etc. then difference in air pollution levels experienced by them can be saved by altering our results by laying common points with respect to their condition which will further depend how sensitive a person having such a disorder is to air pollution levels and by how much, then by comparing these stats with our overall study we would be able to reach at a more accurate result.