The first purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking about a topic that you might be interested in researching for this class. The second purpose is for you to share and exchange ideas with your classmates.

Your choice of a research topic must be related to public health and has actual real-world implications for population health. In particular:

• Your choice of disease/outcome should be health related.  E.g., college students' GPA level is not a public health problem and therefore is not acceptable as an outcome for the purposes of this project. 
• Your combination of exposure, outcome and population should be a fairly new and interesting topic that has not already been extensively studied and proven.  E.g., there is really NO need to study something like "does smoking lead to lung cancer among adults" because it is absolutely no secret that decades of research have already proven it to be true!
• Your whole topic must have a testable hypothesis.  This means you are designing a study to prove a hypothesis, not just to determine what's the prevalence or incidence rate.

Tasks

Step 1: 

In the body of your message, list your choice of the following. Provide any specific details that you want to include.

1. The exposure [E]
2. The disease/outcome [D/O]
3. The population of interest [P]
4. Your research goal in your own words

Click "Post Reply" to submit your answers. You will not be able to see anyone's postings without submitting your own first.

Athena's Example (do not duplicate this one!)

1. Exposure: Long-term electronic cigarette use (also known as vaping)

2. Outcome: Depression (incidence or new onset cases)

3. Population: Young adults between ages 18 and 25 years 

4. My research goal is to determine the potential association between long-term use of e-cigarettes (long-term vaping) and the risk of developing depression among young adults aged 18-25 years.