Organizer:

CRC and ACRM

Presenters:

CRC, Biostatistics Consult and experienced clinical researchers

Who should attend:

Clinicians in the Ministry of Health, Any clinician involved with research clinical,
Researches

Course description:

The ‘Research Methodology and Biostatistics Workshop’ is designed to impart basic skills in research methods and biostatistics. These skills will be needed to design and conduct good quality clinical research. Thus this workshop is designed to provide hands-on opportunity to acquire the necessary skills in basic research methods and biostatistics.

Ideally the participant should have a research idea in mind, and have the commitment to see the research through to its completion. Obviously, a 3-day workshop like this will not make one an expert on research methods or statistics but hopefully it may provide sufficient impetus to get the participants started.

The workshop comprises 2 sections:

The Research methods section comprises 6 lecture sessions supplemented by several practical or exercise sessions. The lecture sessions cover a range of topics such as stating research objective(s), research design, study variables and measurement issues, bias, study population and samples and proposal development. By the end of the first day, you will have learnt how to use design your research and document them in a document called a proposal.

Section 2 is on Biostatistics and comprises 5 lecture sessions supplemented by several computer based practical sessions. These lectures introduce all the basic statistical tools and techniques you will need to analyse and make sense of the data you have collected in your research. Each lecture is accompanied by instruction on how to use the tools and techniques in practice, including use of supporting software during practical sessions of this workshop.

Main objectives

Programme:

• Registration & Welcome Address

  • Session 1
    1.0 Overview of clinical research process

  • Session 2
    2.0 Thinking about your research and stating objectives

  • Session 3
    3.0 Research Design

  • Session 4
    4.0 Variables & Measurement

  • Session 5
    5.0 Bias

  • Session 6
    6.0 Study Population & Sample

  • Session 7
    7.0 Introduction to SPSS
    7.1 Data entry, Management and Preparation using SPSS

  • Session 8
    8.0 Descriptive Analysis
    8.1 Summarising Data
    8.2 Describing the distribution of a single variable
    8.3 Describing the relationship between 2 variables

  • Session 9
    9.0 Analysis of Diagnostic Test Accuracy & Agreement
    9.1 Sensitivity & Specificity
    9.2 Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) plots
    9.3 Kappa: Limits of agreement

  • Session 10
    10.0 Analysis of Clinical Trial Data: Comparing Treatment Groups
    10.1 Binary Response Data
    10.2 Ordinal Response Data
    10.3 Continuous Response Data
    10.4 Survival time Response data

  • Session 11
    11.0 Inferential Statistics