Moving From Representativeness Toward Transportability in an Era of Digital and Big Data

Evidence-based public health demands that study findings provide meaningful insights into improving the health of target populations, making representativeness a widely regarded hallmark of high-quality epidemiological research. However, big data and the digital health datademic are changing the way target and study populations are defined and how to ensure the external validity of study findings. What matters is assessing the degree of transportability of these findings—how well they inform about the target population. I review the gain of shifting the focus away from study representativeness and instead prioritizing the explicit assessment and reporting of transportability.