Syllabus for HLTH 460/462

HLTH 460 14 S1 and HLTH 462Coordinators: Dr Arindam Basu & Professor Philip Schluter

Contact: Dr Arindam Basu, email: arindam.basu@canterbury.ac.nz

Class Days

(All Classes are held in DA02, Dovedale Avenue Campus)1pt0pt 1. March 5-6 (Thursday and Friday, 9 AM - 4 PM)

2. April 2nd (Thursday, 9 AM - 4 PM)

3. May 1st (Friday, 9 AM - 4 PM)

4. May 28th - 29th (Thursday and Friday, 9 AM - 4 PM)

Two Additional Days in August for HLTH 462 students to be decided/announced later.

There are three Assignments: A Questionnairea and a Research Plan (30%), An Early Draft of the Preprocessed Data Analysis (30%) and a Full Report in the form of an Article (40%)

Assignment I: Questionnaire and Research Plan (30% of the total), due 20th March 2015.

Assignment II: Report of the processes of data collection and an initial process of cleaning the data (30% of the total), due 15th May

Assignment III: Research Report (40%), due 15th June for those in HLTH460 and 15th October for those in HLTH462

Details of the Assignments

1. All Assignments should be submitted on the dates (if extentions are needed, please write/discuss with the course coordinators)

2. The Assignments should be submitted using the Learn (link will be made available)

3. The Assignments should be submitted in the form of Word or PDF

documents. No other formats will be accepted, and no paper copies will be accepted.

4. The word counts for Assignment I and Assignment II should not exceed 1500 words, and for Assignment III, the word count should not exceed 2000 words.

5. The word counts do not include words contained in figures, tables, and referenes.

6. Any reasonable referencing will be accepted, although we recommend using APA 6th

Information on the Blocks

Block I: Introduction to Research Design (March 5-6, 2015)At the end of this block, students will be able to learn: 1. List Ways of How to identify research topics 2. Identify and List the different fields of quantitative research 3. How to Write a Proposal and Plan a Study including preparation of Ethics Approval 3. Draft a Study Questionnaire and prepare to collect data from either the community or the university community

Assessment I: Research Plan and Study Questionnaire (30% of the total), Due: 20th March 2015.The Questionnaire or Survey Instrument will be designed by the student. There is no fixed length in terms of word count of the questionnaire and will depend on the specific problem that the student plans to investigate as part of this course. The Assignment must be submitted as PDF or Word Document using the links provided in the Learn Site. The Research plan should not exceed 1500 words (about 3 single spaced typed pages of A4 Times Roman Font) and must contain (1) Title, (2) Review of the Background Literature, (3) Aims and Objectives of the Research, and (4) Methodological Details. Words contained in tables and figures and references are excluded from word count.

List of Lectures and Class Schedule

Day 1: Introduction to Research Design, Causality, Research Types

9-10: Introductions and formation of teams

9-9:15: Introductions and team building (11 students, divided into three groups, 4, 4, and 3, call them A, B, and C teams)

9:15 - 10:15: Lecture 1: Overview of Health Research Methods 10:15 - 12:00: Lecture 2: How to Conduct Research Literature Review and Frame

Questions

12:00-1:00 PM - Lunch Break

1:00 - 2 PM: Cause and Effect in Health Research

2-3 PM: Epidemiological and Non-epidemiological Study Designs

3-4 : Group Work to identify research topics

Day 2: Planning a Research Study

9-12: Introduction to Data Analysis including sampling

12-2: Sample Size and Power Calculations

2-3: Principles of Questionnaire Design

3-4: Group work: draft a questionnaire

Block II: Introduction to Data Collection and Data Preprocessing (April 2nd, 2015, and May 1st, 2015).Note that there is a gap of one month between the two dates. Students will be provided opportunities to either collect their own data themselves or identify data sets that they would then analyse on the 1st May class (a workshop format using R for statistical computing)

At the end of block II of the course, the students will be learn how to:

Take a data set and read in a popular computer data analysis package (R and Stata?)

Learn the key steps of preprocessing data (theory and practical aspects of identifying the following:

1. Reading data into formats (csv, others)

2. Operationalisation of concepts into variables

3. Different types of data (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)

4. Single variable analysis:

(a) Distribution (five number summaries, tables of distribution)

(b) Graphing data

(c) Skewness, Kurtosis importance of knowing the distribution

(d) Outliers different ways to identify single variable outliers

(e) Missing Data what is missing data, what do we do with missing data (exclusion versus imputation)

5. Simple Bivariate Analysis

Assessment II: At the end of this block, the students will be able to report their processes of data collection and an initial process of cleaning the data (30% of the total).The due date for this assignment is 15th May.

The length of this Assignment should not exceed 1500 words, excluding words contained in tables, figures, and references. The Assignment must be submitted in the form of either Word or PDF document using the link provided in the Learn site.

Block III: Data Analysis, Interpretation and Report Writing (May 28th - 29th, 2015, Thursday and Friday)At the end of Block III, the students will learn:

1pt0pt 1. How to conduct data analysis

2. How to interpret the findings

3. Write a report and format journal articles

Assessment III: Write a report on selecting the problem, drafting of questionnaires, running an analysis, and writing a report.The Report is worth 40% of the total grades, and due 15th June, 2015 for HLTH 460 students, and 15th October for HLTH 462 students. The length of the Assignment should not exceed 2000 words and the report must contain (1) Title, (2) Background Literature Review, (3) Methodology, (4) Results, (5) Discussion, and (6) Conclusion. The report should be written in the form of a journal article and must contain appropriate citations.