Evidence-Based Practice for Nurses

The purpose of descriptive epidemiology is to identify

subgroups in populations that may have the highest risk

for a specific disease or outcome. Descriptive epidemiology

is used to find clues about potential causes of disease so

that nurses can generate hypotheses about the relation-

ship between different exposures and diseases or other

health-related outcomes. Descriptive epidemiology is

used to measure disease frequency by person, place, and time to determine

why disease occurs more frequently under certain conditions.

Person

Many descriptive characteristics of the person are factors that contribute to the

frequency of diseases and health-related outcomes (see Table 8-1).

For example, nurses know that life expectancy varies with sex. Other char-

acteristics such as race and ethnicity contribute to life expectancy. Consider

the average life expectancy in the United States for 2011. For all races and both

sexes, life expectancy was 78.7 years. But there are variations in life expectancy

8.4 Descriptive Epidemiology

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

‹ Explain descriptive characteristics of person, place, and time when examining the

distribution of disease in a population

Age Alcohol

Diet/Exercise Education

Ethnicity Genetic markers

Marital status Occupation

Parity Race

Religion Sex

Smoking Socioeconomic status

TABLE 8-1

Examples of Descriptive

Characteristics by Person

FYI

Descriptive epidemiology is used to find clues

about potential causes of disease so that

nurses can generate hypotheses about the

relationship between different exposures and

diseases or other health-related outcomes.

200 CHAPTER 8 Epidemiologic Designs: Using Data to Understand Populations