Course Description
Introduction to the fundamentals of research study design, methods, and data collection. Additional focus on utilizing publicly available secondary data to improve analytic skills. Topics include conceptualization, hypothesis formation, sampling, observation/measurement, design and operationalization, secondary data analysis, and translating knowledge into action.
Athena Title
Health Svcs Res Public Data
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HPAM 7100E
Pre or Corequisite
BIOS 7001 or BIOS 7001E or BIOS 7010 or BIOS 7010E or HPAM 7350 or HPAM 7350E
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will understand how to identify health research questions and develop research objectives to address the gap in literature.
- Students will understand how to critically assess public health/health services research articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
- Students will understand how to select appropriate study designs and analysis strategy for health services research.
- Students will understand how to develop a proposal for a primary research project.
- Students will understand how to identify common challenges encountered during health research and discuss ways to address them.
- Students will understand how to describe the process for conducting ethical health research.
- Students will understand how to manage and analyze data using statistical software packages.
- Students will understand how to describe results and discuss the results in the context of the current literature.
- Students will understand how to demonstrate professional writing skills.
- Students will understand how to develop professional communication, teamwork, and leadership skills.
- Students will understand how to collaborate with colleagues in health service research through different platforms such as local regional and national conferences, and manuscript preparation for peer-reviewed journals.
Topical Outline
- Introduction to research, sources of data, generating research questions
- Conducting literature reviews and focusing on research question; electronic database search
- Introduction to research design, approaches to research and research paradigms, and ethics of research
- Conceptual models, theoretical frameworks, and hypothesis generation
- Getting started with statistical software, loading secondary data sources, data cleaning, and formatting
- Graphic and Data Description: Analyze and design effective data visualization
- Internal Validity I: Overview, roles of variables, units of observation and analysis, unobserved confounding
- Internal Validity II: Threats to internal validity and intro to study design
- Research Design I: Randomized experiments and quasi-experimental designs
- External Validity I: Making generalizable inferences and sampling
- External Validity II: Construct validity
- Conducting descriptive and regression analyses with statistical software
- Writing and critiquing research articles
