Ecological Fallacy #1: There Is a Public Health Workforce Crisis
Inferring individual behavior, such as racial attitudes affecting presidential votes from aggregate data confronts a logical barrier known as the
ecological fallacy. A more robust analysis requires evidence collected directly from individuals.
This could be an
ecological fallacy and states that have more smokers also have lower costs, but it is puzzling when the regression includes an income variable as well.
Along the same lines, the authors show that the now-hackneyed observation that blue states are richer than red states rests on an
ecological fallacy. Microdata and county data reveal a strong, positive correlation between income and voting for Republican candidates.
It seems that there may be
ecological fallacy at play here.
To see the
ecological fallacy at work, picture fans doing "the wave" at a football stadium.
"But they tend to be the
ecological fallacy: `If the forest is great, the trees are great.' In a healthy forest, there are ailing trees."
In particular, Professors Gill and Katz committed what is referred to as the
ecological fallacy in making inferences about a particular individual's voting behavior using only information about the average behavior of groups; in this case, voters assigned to a particular precinct.
The
ecological fallacy, the drawing of inferences about individuals based on aggregate level data, was discovered over 50 years ago but is still present in a surprising number of commonly employed marketing and advertising research tools.
This supports a direct link and contradicts a possible "
ecological fallacy" as the time frame, which has an abrupt beginning and end, is similar for both the dioxin crisis and the decline in number of Campylobacter infections (21).
The author's ready acceptance, however, of the face value of residents' reasons for the opposition may risk committing a twisted form of "
ecological fallacy" or of a reversal of independent and dependent variables in complex association analysis.