PHCA9511 Social Statistics in Public Health

2015

9

1 x 50-minute lecture fortnightly
1 x 2-hour workshop fortnightly

1 of PHCA8511, PHCA8927, PHCA9511A, PHCA9511B has been successfully completed

Basic understanding of both the social determinants of health and epidemiological research design.

This topic is available to students enrolled in other graduate awards with the approval of the MPH course coordinator.

Assignments; Tutorial presentation.

Within public health, there is a need for researchers, practitioners and policy makers to understand and interpret statistical findings from research. This topic focuses on social statistics in contrast to more traditionally taught bio-statistics, sincethe overall course has an underlying aim around exploring the social determinants of public health. It is widely recognised that many research questions in the social world cannot be addressed using purely bivariate analyses, since relationships betweenvariables tend to be multi-factorial with a number of competing, and often conflicting, associations/relationships. Therefore this topic uses publicly-available public health datasets to introduce descriptive and inferential bivariate analyses, in addition to more advanced multivariate statistical techniques. The learning will consist of a balance between acquiring the academic understanding of social statistical techniques and applying such knowledge in practice, through the use of a statistical software package (SPSS). In this way, students get the hands-on experience of working with a real public health dataset in order to develop and test hypotheses.

The aims of the topic are enable students to:

• make informed and justified decisions over the choice of statistical techniques for the analysis of public health data

• employ a range of bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses (descriptive and inferential), based on nominal, ordinal and interval level data

• use the SPSS software package and to understand the scope of this package in social statistical analysis

• critically interpret the results of statistical analyses, and to relate their findings to relevant theory/literature in their academic disciplines

By the end of this topic, students should be able to:

• plan and undertake a secondary analysis of an existing public health dataset

• critically evaluate and demonstrate an informed understanding of the statistical outputs from hypothesis testing

• justify the use of particular statistical techniques, including making informed decisions over the choice of statistical techniques

• critically understand of the range of alternatives in SPSS for bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis

• critically apply a range of bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques applicable to nominal, ordinal and interval level variables

• critically evaluate the use of statistical techniques in published work