Foundations in Research Methods and Data Analysis

The aim of this course is to provide you with understanding and skills in research to enable you to access and critically appraise evidence relevant to your particular field, as well as to plan a research study or service evaluation.

This course has been designed to meet the needs of clinical practitioners across the non-medical workforce and students pursuing qualifications in public health, health policy and health management. The course design and structure ensures there is a focus throughout on the applicability of the course content and materials to the varied clinical practice of the health professional workforce.

Who is it for?

This course has been designed to meet the needs of clinical practitioners across the medical and non-medical workforce, as well as students pursuing qualifications in public health, health policy, advanced clinical practice and health management.

Timetable

This course is delivered in Autumn and Spring terms, over 5 weeks, with taught sessions delivered on one day (Mondays, typically 10.00-17.00) each week.

Benefits

This course provides you with basic research skills to enable you to access the evidence base and perform entry-level statistics.

This course may be undertaken as part of the School of Health Sciences Masters programmes, or as a CPD course worth 30 CPD hours.

Credits

This course is worth 15 credits toward eligible programmes.

We aim to support you to achieve sufficient proficiency to:

• Conduct a systematic literature search,
• Clarify and quantify the pertinent aspects of a health condition or service requirement and relate this to a feasible research question,
• Understand the main research designs and methods used in health services research and their differing purposes, strengths and weaknesses,
• Access and apply suitable criteria and frameworks to appraise the quality of different research designs and methods,
• Understand and apply appropriate methods to develop data collection instruments such as questionnaires, and interview and focus group topic guides
• Understand and apply basic approaches to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative research findings, including introductory knowledge of a commonly used statistical software package (SPSS)
• Demonstrate critical awareness of research methods and study designs, and confidence in formulating feasible and appropriate research questions
• Provide justification for whether qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods approaches are best suited to a particular research enquiry
• Understand the principles of quantifying health findings such as prevalence, proportional distribution, measures of central tendency, confidence intervals and statistical significance

The course covers the following:

• An introduction to research (problem statements, study designs)
• The research process (developing research questions, funding, how to plan and carry out a research project, getting research into practice)
• Searching for evidence (electronic databases, key words, inclusion and exclusion criteria)
• Critical appraisal skills (how to assess the quality of research)
• Conducting and presenting a literature review
• Recognising and evaluating different study designs
• Choosing, interpreting and reporting analyses
• Basic quantitative statistics (probability, significance and confidence intervals, descriptive statistics, basic comparative parametric & non-parametric statistics)
• Qualitative methods (interviews and focus groups, developing and using a topic guide, interview techniques and conducting an interview)

Values and attitudes:

• Consider the requirements for conducting rigorous research
• Understand the importance of health care delivery and health care resource distributions being based on robust high quality evidence
• Have regard for ethical issues relating to research in health and social care settings

The teaching will involve lectures and smaller group workshops in which a combination of individual and group learning activities will be used.

This teaching will be supplemented by self-directed study using worksheets and exercises, which will be made available either via Moodle or via email.

The assessments for this course are as follows:

1. An examination comprising multiple-choice questions which cover basic knowledge across the range of topics taught.
2. An analytic report using methods of systematic enquiry involving elements of literature review, research design and qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

Both parts of this course assessment must be passed for successful course completion.

This course is worth 15 credits at level 7

Credits

This course is worth 15 credits toward eligible programmes.

Overseas students can only apply as part of a programme, not as a stand-alone course.

A first degree in a medical/health or social sciences discipline is required (minimum 2:1 honours degree, 3.0 GPA or an equivalent international degree).

Applicants with equivalent qualifications or substantial experience in health services will also be considered on an individual basis.

English requirements

For those students whose first language is not English, the following qualification is also required:

• IELTS: 7.0