Odum Institute

This course will provide an introduction to effectively designing web surveys to avoid common pitfalls that impact data quality and introduce measurement error. The course will focus on the following... Read more »

This course will focus on both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques to measure health. Participants will be able to describe and recognize the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages and practical consequences of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods in a health research setting; set out quality criteria for assessing qualitative research and discuss these criteria... Read more »

Daily life methods are a family of methods used to study what people do in their ordinary environments in their everyday lives through collecting data at least once a day for several days. Two common forms of daily life methods, daily diaries and experience sampling methods, will be emphasized in this course. This course will... Read more »

This course will introduce some of the best practices of professional software development. Participants will learn to structure their R code into reusable functions and store those functions as separate scripts and/or packages and will learn to write automated tests for their functions, to help confirm that results are as expected and to ensure that... Read more »

This course will address how you can use qualitative research to draw attention to underlying mechanisms that define social problems. They will discuss qualitative processes to better position you in your efforts to design & collect data specifically aimed at contributing directly to social justice. Timely issues, including racial disparities in policing, will be used... Read more »

Focus groups are commonly used to capture rich information about attitudes and beliefs. This class will prepare prospective students to organize and moderate focus groups. Students will learn the most appropriate uses of focus groups, how to segment and recruit audiences, how to develop a moderator’s guide, and how to moderate focus groups. The class... Read more »

This course provides a general introduction to qualitative data collection methods, with an emphasis on applications within public health. We will examine the two most commonly used qualitative data collection methods: in-depth interviews and focus groups. Supplemental qualitative data collection activities will be covered. Course structure includes lecture, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises. Examples will include... Read more »

This course focuses on what it means to develop codes & how to integrate memo writing into the larger process of coding & analysis. Coding and memo writing function as simultaneous & fluid tasks that occur during actively reviewing interviews, focus groups, & multi-media data. We will discuss the tension between deductive & inductive codes... Read more »

This course provides training on evaluating public services and programs. At the end of the course, participants will understand and be able to describe program evaluation, and how it can help you understand the basics of assessing program impact. In addition, participants will be able to identify a variety of program evaluation tools, map out... Read more »

There is a substantial gap between the development of innovations in medicine, public health, education and other fields. Implementation science is an emerging field that is dedicated to the study of closing this gap by scientifically identifying the factors that facilitate and impede the systematic uptake of knowledge and evidence. Learn more and register.

Qualtrics is a powerful browser-based web-survey tool. Qualtrics allows users to build complex surveys, distribute them, and analyze the responses all from one place. We will cover basic Qualtrics functions including creating multiple choice and text entry questions, programming display and skip logic, distributing surveys, creating and uploading contact lists, and sharing a survey. This... Read more »

This short course will be a basic introduction to integrative data analysis, the simultaneous analysis of pooled individual-level data. Participants will gain familiarity with the underlying concepts & tools that are central to this approach, which is increasingly used in various fields including public health, behavioral medicine, epidemiology, & clinical trials. The course will include... Read more »

This course will be a brief and thorough introduction to modern methods of time series analysis. Topics to be covered include elementary time series models, trend and seasonality, stationary processes, autoregressive/integrated/moving average (ARIMA) processes, fitting ARIMA models, forecasting, spectral analysis, the periodogram, spectral estimation techniques and multivariate time series. Additional topics may be covered if... Read more »

This course introduces participants to constructivist grounded theory (CGT). Grounded theory (GT) methods consist of flexible guidelines to fit particular research problems, not to apply mechanically. With these guidelines, you... Read more »