This past reading was interesting for two reasons. The first was the actual tangible information they found. In essence it was a reiteration of what had been stated before, that condom use, fewer sexual partners, and a later sexual initiation was crucial to lowering the spread of HIV AIDS. Although this was no new news, it was excellent to see a different perspective of charts and graphs. This part of the data then brings us to my second intriguing factor: how these positive traits stem from different behavior. What are these behaviors and are they applicable to the spread to different regions.
However what was far more interesting to me was the ability for members of a community to challenge (in such a critical yet constructive way) each other and their findings. This came at the very beginning and stayed throughout the article.
Although much of the information listed above was and is perceived as good, it was relieving to find that people don’t just take the good information at face value. Instead, they critically examined how this data came to be in hopes of finding the cause as well as to see whether or not it’s applicable to the general hypothesis. This is crucial when remembering that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. As demonstrated above this became very important in examining this specific set of data. We can only hope that this form of critic can be converted to all types of research in all areas of science.
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