Department of Geography and Resource Management and Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
Health Place. 2021 Jul;70:102609. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102609. Epub 2021 Jun 17.
An implicit assumption often made in research on the environmental determinants of health is that the relationships between environmental factors and their health effects are stable over space and time. This is the assumption of stationarity. The health impacts of environmental factors, however, may vary not only over space and time but also over the value ranges of the environmental factors under investigation. Few studies to date have examined how often the stationarity assumption is violated and when violated, to what extent findings might be misleading. Using selected studies as examples, this paper explores how the stationarity assumption can lead to misleading conclusions about health-environment relationships that may in turn have serious health consequences or policy implications. It encourages researchers to embrace nonstationarity and recognize its meaning because it helps direct our attention to the ignored factors or processes that may enhance our understanding of the phenomena under investigation.
在研究环境因素对健康的影响时，人们通常会做出一个隐含的假设，即环境因素与其健康影响之间的关系在空间和时间上是稳定的。这就是稳定性假设。然而，环境因素对健康的影响不仅会随时间和空间而变化，还会随所研究的环境因素的数值范围而变化。迄今为止，很少有研究探讨稳定性假设被违反的频率，以及在违反假设的情况下，研究结果可能在多大程度上产生误导。本文通过选择一些研究案例，探讨了稳定性假设如何导致对健康与环境关系的错误结论，而这些错误结论可能会对健康产生严重后果或对政策产生影响。本文鼓励研究人员接受非稳定性假设，并认识到其意义，因为这有助于我们关注可能增强我们对所研究现象的理解的被忽视的因素或过程。
