Forecasting Illness Aboard Navy Ships: Methodological Issues.
Abstract
Analyses of data from destroyer-type ships were used to develop a model called the Morbidity Forecast Model (MFM) which was designed to predict specific and total illnesses aboard Navy ships. In the present study, the MFM was applied to a sample of amphibious assault ships to evaluate the instruments, procedures, and validity of illness predictions of the model. Results indicated that the individual predictor instruments were reliable and that five out of six correlated significantly with total illness. However, because of problems encountered when employing a novel method for constructing the prediction equations, the MFM initially performed poorly when applied to prediction of illness on amphibious ships. But, when the equations were reconstituted, the predictions improved considerably. Also, when ship differences were removed to compensate for the lack of power due to the small sample size, the MFM predicted a significant amount of variance in four or five illness categories. Thus, it was concluded that the MFM can be used to predict illness rates from environmental conditions aboard ship. However, it was suggested that, in the future, predictions could be improved by better adjusting for ship-type differences and by taking into account the operational status of each ship throughout a deployment. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 11, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA117924
Entities
People
- William Pugh
Organizations
- Naval Health Research Center