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Clinical decisions in ageing and diverse populations are increasingly being made by health care professionals. They must also deal with rising health-care costs, fragmented health-care supply, and evolving medical technologies and information-technology systems. These advancements go beyond everyday practise and will necessitate the acquisition of new skills. This course will walk you through the key steps in designing a research study, from developing the research question to avoiding common pitfalls when interpreting your findings. We will concentrate on analytical studies used in etiological research, which seeks to determine the causal relationship between potential risk factors (or determinants) and a specific disease or other outcome. However, the principles we'll go over apply to the majority of research questions, and you'll see these study designs in prognostic and diagnostic research settings as well.
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You will be able to formulate a good research question
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You will be able to interpret and apply different frequency and effect measures
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You will be able to recognize errors and deal with bias and confounding
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You will be able to describe basic principles of causal inference
Syllabus :
1. (A) Welcome to Study Design
- Population Health: Study Design
- How to succeed in your online class?
(B) Design
- Introduction
- What is epidemiology?
- How to create a good research question?
- What is the research question?
- Experimental versus observational studies
- The cohort study
- The case-control study
- Bloodcurdling movies and measures of coagulation - a crossover trial
- To conclude
2. Measures
- Introduction
- Frequency measures
- Effect measures
- Odds and odds ratio
- Kaplan-Meier
- Thoughts on absolute versus relative risk
- To conclude
3. Confounding and bias
- Introduction
- Puzzles in Epidemiology
- Random versus systematic error
- Confounding and bias
- Countering confounding
- Standardisation
- To conclude
4. Inference
- Introduction
- When do we know something is true?
- Intention to treat
- To conclude
- Course conclusion
