First Assessment: Research Idea, weight: 30%, marked out of 30, due: 14th March, 2019, 5 PM)
Write a research proposal on a topic of your choice; word limit: 1500 words. Word count excludes tables (including words in caption), figures (including words in caption), references. Use APA style referencing. You will learn about APA referencing in the class on library use, otherwise consult the following website
What to do:
- Choose a topic that you will work on
- Research background information on the topic and write what is known about the issue, what is not known about the issue, and what knowledge gap will you address in your research (you will learn more about how to spot gaps and arguments in the first class)
- Write the method that you will use to address this problem (You will learn about study designs in the first day of the lecture)
- Write the significance of the work
What shall you include in your paper:
- Write your Student ID at the top of the paper (this is your first entry)
- Write the title of the paper
- Introduce the health issue with graphs, tables, and data - describe what is "known" about the topic
- Write about what is "missing" or "not known" about the topic and what is worth investigating
- Write about what you will investigate in your research
- Write how you will investigate in your research
- All facts must be cited and a list of references must be provided at the end of the paper (there is no fixed length of the reference list)
- Your word count cannot exceed 1500 words. The word count does not include words in your tables, captions, figures, and words contained in reference list.
- Submit the paper through Learn by 14th March, 5 PM
Second Assessment: data cleaning, weight: 30%, due: 14th April, 2019 5 PM
Read and analyse the data set and write a report on the data analysis (1500 words)
What to do:
- Read the related story and choose a data set to work on
- Read the data into dplyr/tidyverse, and clean the data set to convert the data into a tidy data
- Prepare data tables and generate relevant graphs related to your queries
- Write about the topic
What shall you include in your paper:
- Write your Student ID at the top of the paper (this is your first entry)
- Write the title of the paper
- Describe your data cleaning process
- Describe the results using graphs and tables
- Write the significance of the findings
- For all facts you state, you must cite where you found them, and you must provide a list of references at the end of the paper (there is no fixed length of the reference list)
- Your word count cannot exceed 1500 words. The word count does not include words in your tables, captions, figures, and words contained in reference list.
- Submit the paper through Learn by 14th April, 5 PM
Third Assessment, Research Proposal, 40%, due date: 24th May 2019 5 PM
Write a research proposal as follows:
- Write your student ID at the top of the document
- Write the title of the research proposal
- Write a summary of the proposal
- Write an introduction or background section where you will write about the health issue you want to work on and the exposure or the intervention you want to explore. Next, write about gaps in the knowledge that you will investigate. Thus the introduction section will have three subsections (1) what is the issue and what do we know about the issue, (2) what is not known or what needs to be identified about the issue, and (3) what you will investigate. This section will end with a goal and a set of objectives about the research you are about to undertake.
- Now write a methods section, where you will (1) write the the type of study design you will employ and explain why you will use this study designs, the advantage and disadvantage of using this study design; (2) the population you will investigate, (3) describe the exposure or the intervention; (4) describe the outcome you want to study; (5) how you will go about collecting data for the study; (6) what analysis you will plan to achieve the results.
Please note:
- Your word limit: 2000 words (this is a limit not a target)
- Word count excludes words in the figures, captions, tables, references.
- All facts you state must be cited or referenced (there is no upper or lower limit to the number of references you can cite)
- Submit your proposal using Learn by 24th May, 5 PM
List of Data Sets and Challenge Problems
Resources
Critical thinking, book by Gambrill and Gibbs \cite{book:1703804}.
Studies and data sets for the third block
In the second block of this course, we will take a study and analyse the associated data sets. Here are a choice of studies
Description: a study by Mahmud et. al. (2017) where they analysed socio-demographic determinants of locomotor disability among Bangladeshis \cite{Mahmud_2017}
Second Study:
Title: Relationship between employment types and subjective health in Belgium
Description: Van Aerden et al (2017) conducted a cross sectional survey on Belgians about their employment and their subjective health.
Third Study:
Home food environment ...
Websites, Journal Articles and Books
Articles
Wickham, H. (2014). Tidy data.
Journal of Statistical Software.
Full Text LinkBlock I:
Harris, A., Reeder, R. N., & Hyun, J. K. (2009). Common statistical and research design problems in manuscripts submitted to high-impact public health journals.
… Open Public Health Journal. (
Full Text Link)
Ellis, T. J., & Levy, Y. (2008). Framework of problem-based research: A guide for novice researchers on the development of a research-worthy problem.
Informing Science: International …. (
Full Text Link)