Question

1. What is surveillance?

2. What is reliability?

3. What is validity? 

4. What is specificity?

Answer 1

Answer 1: Surveillance refers to the act of identification of a particular type of symptoms/group of symptoms/prevalanve/incidences etc in a give set of population over a period of time in order to extract a scientifically useful information. The survey records are highly important in nature since they form the basis of a scientific study. Extensive surveys and their statistical relevance must be carefully observed.

Answer 2: Reliability refers to technical dependency and associationship of two data-sets with each other so that a meaningful scientifc interpretation might be formulated from them. For example, the reliability of stomach infections on food habits is very high whereas with the life-style of the individual might be low.

Answer 3: Validation is a scientific method to proof-read the scientific outcomes with any high-throughput screening method, any mathematical calculation or verification with pre-exisiting results/trends. Validation of scientific data helps in establishment of the trends/outcomes observed in literature.

Answer 4: The term "specificicty" refers to the nature of exactness a scientific/demographic data set demonstrates when a given set of conditions is kept constant. For example, the specificity of the incidences calculated for onset of oral cancer in patients with previous history of bad oral hygein is very high, as compared to those who maintained a good oral hygein.