Lifespan is a subject that recently attracts an essential amount of human attention. It is not surprising as people are curious about the factors influencing their life duration and life quality. A substantial amount of research was made investigating and calculating the major issues prolonging or shortening peoples’ lives. In this assignment, one of the newspaper articles about lifespan research will be estimated from the terms of its content and study characteristics.
In the article from Times Magazine, the authors report about the research made by investigators from New York University School of Medicine highlighted various factors impacting life duration (Ducharme & Wolfson, 2019). The authors of the study estimated 500 U.S. cities with a population of at least 66.000 people and took data from City Health Dashboard as the basement for the research.
The major focus of the study was to identify the cities with the shortest rate of life duration. During the investigation, researchers identified 56 cities where humans could expect to live 20 years less than in other locations (Ducharme & Wolfson, 2019). Apart from that, among factors influencing life duration zip code, air pollution, access to healthy products, nature, medical aid, level of income, city of permanent stay, race and ethnicity, obesity, and smoking were underlined (Ducharme & Wolfson, 2019). Researchers also identified national and ethnic disparities in cities to be one of the influencing factors on life-expectancy gaps. According to Ducharme and Wolfson (2019), the cities with the largest gaps were Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York.
The researchers used the observational research method and qualitative research design as they gathered the data from an online resource, the City Health Dashboard, that uses multiple sources and allows to compare data according to the aims of the search. The hypothesis of the research was to prove that city-level health disparities depend on various modified and non-modified factors and to calculate such differences. Reliability and validity concerns involve the data gathering from online resources depending on the access to them and their measures may be changing within time. Moreover, the data refreshment in the City Health Dashboard and any other online platform might be rare, and some measures from small-sized territories can be not very precise. The latter can lead to inaccuracies in calculations due to secondary data estimation.
The advantage of using online data is in its availability, scale, and quick access to analyses. However, secondary data does not provide the full picture of the issue and might lead to inaccuracies in estimations as they are based on other assessments. The future findings question mostly focuses on the possible solutions to the life-expectancy gaps shortage in urban areas and improving the life durations outcomes in big city centers. If I was to conduct another study based on this study, I would want to calculate the future expectations of lifespan in such megapolises as Chicago, Washington D.C, and New York and find possible solutions to prevent the progressive shortage of the citizens. Moreover, some of the highlighted modified factors influencing lifespan can be manipulated with the terminal aim to reduce life-expectancy gaps in these cities.
Thus, in this research paper, the assessment of the newspaper article about research regarding lifespan is presented. Investigators from the New York University School of Medicine gathered data from 500 most populous U.S. cities and identified major factors impacting life duration rates. The further concern of the research should be focused on minimizing risks for people living in large urban areas. This can prevent the negative influence of identified factors and improve the health rate of the populations.
Reference
Ducharme, J., & Wolfson, E. (2019). Your ZIP code might determine how long you live – And the difference could be decades. Time Magazine. Web.