Tailored to the particular interests and needs of individual students, the tutorials take many forms-literature reviews, research projects, field trips, and other special studies or learning experiences. Their objective is to enrich the student’s program. General public health subject areas for tutorials might include dental public health, health education, international health, nutrition, drug abuse, and other topical concerns not specifically dealt with in formal courses or in departmental or other study programs.
This course will provide students with a thorough introduction to applied regression analysis, which has been a commonly used and almost standard method for analyzing continuous response data in Public Health research. Topics covered include simple linear regression, multiple linear regression, analysis of variance, parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, interpretation of estimates, interaction terms, variable recoding, examination of validity of underlying assumptions, regression diagnostics, model selection, logistic regression analysis, generalized linear models as well as discussions on relationships of variables in research and using regression results for either prediction or estimation purposes. Real data are emphasized and analyzed using SAS.
Applications of behavioral insights are expanding rapidly across civic, medical, social, corporate, educational, and economic professions. This class covers the underlying theories for behavioral science, using scientific and real-world examples of applications from multiple disciplines and locations. The course will also cover methods for behavioral policy implementation and evaluation, focusing particularly on healthcare policy perspectives. Students will learn a broad range of strategies through a highly interactive format, taught partially in a classroom setting in addition to remote asynchronous and synchronous sessions. Students will gain experience designing and developing their own evidence-based behavioral interventions as a part of a group project.
This course is designed as an advanced seminar/workshop for 2nd year master’s students in epidemiology who are seeking to strengthen their critical thinking skills and hone their abilities to effectively communicate public health content to varied audiences, for varied purposes, through scientific writing and oral communication. This course will provide practical experiences that reinforce core epidemiology skills, including data interpretation, data synthesis, and critical analysis of epidemiologic research, with an emphasis on logic and reasoning, scientific argumentation, and effective communication. Didactic lectures/presentations and course discussions will focus on identifying and appropriately citing scientific sources; making logical scientific arguments; effective argumentation; effective writing and oral presentation skills development/enhancement; identifying challenges to effective written and oral communication and strategies to address them; skills development in the peer-review process, and tailoring scientific presentations to various types of audiences and for various purposes. Students should have a public health topic or research question of interest before the start of the semester. Students who enroll in this class can be exempt from P9419, Master’s Thesis I.
Increasing demand for transparency and accountability, particularly with respect to donor-funded humanitarian programs, has heightened the need for skilled evaluators. To this end, students in this course will become familiar with various forms of evaluation and acquire the technical skills necessary for their development, design and execution through lectures and discussion, exercises, guest presentations and real-world examples. Specifically, students will discover evidence-based methods for identifying stakeholders, crafting evaluation questions, designing instruments, sampling and data gathering to achieve good response rates, analysis and synthesis of information for report-writing and case studies.
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) has received growing attention over the past several decades as international, domestic, funding agencies and researchers have renewed a focus on an approach to health that recognizes the importance of social, political, and economic systems to health behaviors and outcomes. The long-standing importance of this approach is already reflected in the 1988 Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) landmark report The Future of Public Health and many other publications. The report indicates that communities and community-based organizations are one of six potential partners in the public health system and that building community-based partnerships is a priority area for improving public health. CBPR is not a method but an approach to research and practice that involves the active collaboration of the potential beneficiaries and recognizes and values the contributions that communities and their leaders can make to new knowledge and to the translation of research findings into public health practice and policy. CBPR is a collaborative approach to research that recognizes the value of equitably involving the intended beneficiaries throughout all phases of research and/or intervention design, implementation, and evaluation. CBPR is also an important approach to advance health and social equity and is essentially a way to promote and operationalize health and social equity in research settings.