Videos: Part 1. A Father's Decision

This multimedia segment, Part 1. Revisiting a Father’s Decision in 1736, includes two videos. Students look back to revisit a decision that Benjamin Franklin had to make in 1736, in the context of smallpox epidemics coming every couple of years to Boston or Philadelphia, about whether he should inoculate his child. In addition to the videos, materials include an instructor's note, companion slides, a glossary, an annotated bibliography, and sample exercises.

After identifying the elements of the decision problem (e.g., objectives, alternatives, probabilities, and outcomes) students build a decision tree to represent the events in the sequence in which they occur, differentiating decision nodes, chance nodes and terminal nodes.  They integrate the data provided on probabilities and outcomes and calculate the expected value of each alternative by “averaging and folding back”. Finally, they conduct a sensitivity analysis to gain insight into how the results would change if the values assumed were higher or lower than initially believed.

Access the videos.

• Video 1.1 Structuring a father’s decision (~14 min)
• Video 1.2 Analyzing a father’s decision (~23 min)

Multimedia segment Part 1. A Father's Decision (Videos 1.1, 1.2) should be followed by Part 2. Mosquito-Borne Threat (Videos 2.1, 2.2, 2.3).

This teaching pack was developed by Sue J. Goldie at the Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The multimedia components were developed as part of a series of pilots in the CHDS Media Hub, led by Jake Waxman, where media-based pedagogy experiments contribute to new ways of thinking about short form content.