TheoryMethodsII

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The primary purpose of this course is to introduce critical scientific methods in health research and learn to apply them in order to produce empirical research. This course will survey the basics of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods in health research and practice. By the end of the course, students will have gained a broad understanding of key approaches and learned to select the most appropriate analytic approaches to address a problem or to answer a question. For quantitative skills, we will cover basic research design and statistics including fundamentals of probability, statistical inference, basic statistical assumptions and hypothesis-testing using correlations, non-parametric tests, analysis of variance, and regression. For qualitative skills, we will cover grounded theory, content analysis, ethnographic participant-observation methods, interview techniques, focus groups, archival research, and discourse analysis. This hands-on course is built around a semester-long team project, in which students will design their own research project: selecting an interesting question, proposing methods to address the question, performing literature review and syntheses, and producing a final research presentation and report.