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