Refer to Exercise 36, about a report on the relationship between drinking alcohol and likelihood of death, with the headline “Study: Daily drink cuts death.”
a. Explain whether you think the headline is justified for this study.
b. The study was based on recording drinking habits for the 490,000 participants in 1982 and then noting death rates for the next 9 years. Is this a retrospective or a prospec-tive study?
c. Comment on each of the “difficulties and disasters in observational studies” (Section 5.5) as applied to this study.