Article reviewed: "The role of the physical and traffic environment in child pedestrian injuries." Pediatrics, Vol. 98, No. 6. December, 1996.

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   Critical Review

Student Name:  Julia PU

Student No.:  30646723

Tutor’s name: Dr Alan Jones

Article reviewed: “The role of the physical and traffic environment in child pedestrian injuries.” Pediatrics, Vol. 98, No. 6. December, 1996.

Date of submission: Friday October 13th, 2000.

Agran, Phyllis F.; Diane G. Winn; Craig L. Anderson; Cecile Tran; Celeste P. Del Valle. “The role of the physical and traffic environment in child pedestrian injuries.” Pediatrics, Vol. 98, No. 6. December, 1996.  

Pedestrian injuries have always be a dominant threaten to parents as it would result in severe injury or death among younger children. Increasing, it has became not only a issue that concerns our community, but a important topic that gains large number of attention from the whole society. Scientist, phycologist and educators have put a great deal of effort on academic research in order to investigate the major causes of  pedestrian injuries, and so that different approaches can be used to prevent childhood pedestrian injuries. While previous studies have focused on vehicle speed and traffic volume which associated with greater injury incidence, a group of scientists (including Phyllis F. Agran, Diane G. Winn, Craig L. Anderson, Cecile Tran and Celeste P. Del Valle) designed a case-control study for Latino children in southern California  aged between 1 to 14 years old. The purpose of this study is to identify environmental risk factors on residential neighbourhood streets for paediatric injuries. Factors which were taken into account embrace the number parked vehicle on road, pedestrian presents, car speed and traffic volume. Although this study provides a very detailed and valued  information on childhood pedestrian injuries, it is limited to the investigation on the cases occurring on the street in front of the child’s residence which would not be appropriate to represent the overall condition in neighbourhood.

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In the section titled “Method”, a very detailed description of the process in regards of the case-control is provided. There are careful explanation of  the reason why certain amount of factors are taken into consideration while others are not. But still technical term such as “conditional logistic regression” is left unexplained while it could be the actual title that refers to the overall method. Furthermore, there are several other technical terms, “odds ratio” [OR] and “confidence interval” [CI] which are frequently referred yet explained. The lack of sufficient explanation accompany certain technical terms cause confusion in readers, especially for ...

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