Thursday, 25 February 2010

Reflections on the assignment

I'd like to clarify a few points about this journaling. I also wanted to write about the bicycle helmet article and its critique that we discussed last week as several of you have been working on that paper and probably found that interesting. 

Some of you have requested for some clarification as to how to go about finding articles, etc. 

I suggest that do identify an article, do the following:

1. Try to frame a question. A possible question might be: "What is the effectiveness of physical exercise for reducing aggression in dementia patients?" It's a question for a big topic, nevertheless, if you note, you will see it has the following format:

Statement < name of an intervention> for < health outcome >

2. After selecting an appropriate, fairly interesting question that you want to answer (selection of this question will depend on your interests), go to a website for finding if someone has already worked on it. Some example website where you can find answers to that in the form of journal articles:

The UC Library - Great resource, try here first, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/databases/

Pubmed - http://www.pubmed.com

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com

These are some suggestions. I trust you will find more resources to work on. 

3. Run a search containing your desired search terms. If you do not know how to search the web, there are some excellent search tutorials put together by the library staff here:

http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/infolit/tutorials/databases/

Again, a great resource that you may want to use quite often. If possible, bookmark this resource (I shall discuss at a later session how you can use services like diigo (http://www.diigo.com) and Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com) to organize your research but for this time, follow one of their guides.

4. After you have completed the search and have identifed one article (just pick up one article), read the article with respect to the guides I have posted above.

5. Finally, based on these guides, write your paper and limit it to between 400-500 words. You can, for extra bonus add citations, figures, tables, etc. But these won't count towards the words in the text. 

If there are more questions, feel free to ask.

i shall write about my reflections on the bicycle helmet article in a separate entry.

 


Wednesday, 24 February 2010

Our First Reflection

Hello, and welcome to the first week of the class. We discussed in this week the basics of reading and interpreting research.

As a quick recap,

* We started talking about some recent research we have come across in our readings and experiences, and work

* We saw based on these preliminaries, not all of us could identify notable research that they came across in their readings or experience.

* We learned that there are basically two approaches to health research: descriptive research (which describes health states and events in great details, or causal research (where the investigator is mainly interested in identifying possible causes of phenomena)

* We saw how research can be influential in changing policies even if there can be flaws in research and how statistics can be used to justify some actions (our discussions)



By way of introduction, the process of research has the following steps:

1) Identifying a health problem

2) Framing Hypothesis about the health problem

3) Collection of data

4) Analysis of data

5) Presentation of data

Can you now identify a published paper, and describe how in the research paper, each of the steps were conducted & presented.

The submissions are live now, but will close on Next Weekend (7th March, 2010). This is in keeping with the provision that some of you do not yet have e-mail access or otherwise access to UC learn.
I have posted this assignment to this blog. This is a blog where I will be writing from time to time refletions on our class meetings and stuff. At this time the blog is open to the world but we can make it a close private blog if that's how you prefer it.

Think of this blog as a supplement to your studies in the class

Best,
Arin