140.613.11 DATA ANALYSIS WORKSHOP I

Intended for students with a broad understanding of biostatistical concepts used in public health sciences who seek to develop additional data analysis skills. Emphasizes concepts and illustration of concepts applying a variety of analytic techniques to public health datasets in a computer laboratory using Stata statistical software. In the first workshop (140.613), students learn basic methods of data organization/management and simple methods for data exploration, data editing, and graphical and tabular displays. Additional topics include comparison of means and proportions, simple linear regression and correlation. Enrollment limited: students must have a laptop computer with Stata 8 installed.

Upon successfully completing this course, students will be able to: 1) learn to create, save and edit Stata datasets, log files and do files; 2) use Stata to perform exploratory data analysis for continous and dichotomous variables; 3) use Stata do files to create reproducible analyses; 4) recognize the distinction between and appropriate uses of the binomial, poisson and normal probability models; 5) use Stata to perform paired and unpaired t-tests for differences in group means; 6) understand the appropriate use of paired and unpaired t-tests and the interpretation of the resulting Stata output; 7) use Stata to perform a chi-squared test and compute confidence intervals for differences in group proportions, relative risks and odds ratios; 8) understand the appropriate use of chi-squared tests and the interpretation of the resulting Stata output.