Assessment
Detailed description of the Assignments
You will have to complete Assignment I and either Assignment II Track A or Assignment II Track B. The submission dates for the assignments are same for all students.
The purpose of the first assessment is to test your skills of writing a research proposal and draft an instrument to collect data using a survey. The purpose of the second and the third assessment is to test your skills of data analysis at various stages – in the second assessment, we shall test your skills of reading a data set and performing initial cleaning of the data set and write a set of tables to conduct data analyses. In the third assessment, we shall test your skills of reading data sets, cleaning data sets, and using data in the data set to write a research article. All assessments must be:
submitted in the form of PDF document
submitted in the format we provide here
only submitted in electronic format (we do not need printouts, or we do not need hard copies; further, you do not have to submit a cover sheet for these assignments). Submit through Learn using the link on the Learn site. Do not email us a copy.
please submit all assignments on time by the date specified in the table.
Please follow the word limit specified in the description.
First Assessment (50%, due: 23rd March, 2017)
In this first assignment, your task is to write a 1500-word research proposal on a chosen topic. Here are the tasks you will perform:
You will choose a topic that you will work on
You will research background information on the topic and write what is known about the issue, what is not known about the issue, and what knowledge gap will you address in your research
You will write about the method that you will use to address this problem
You will describe the process of data collection for your research and briefly explain how you will analyse the data to arrive at the solution to the problem you will describe to solve
Please note the few restrictions for this assignment:
First of all, the topic you will choose must be a health related topic (any topic related to population or public health, environmental health, or any other aspect of health or healthcare will be acceptable for this assignment. Please do not choose biomedical laboratory based topics. Such topics are beyond the scope of this paper course.
Second, the research you will conduct to arrive at your solution must be quantitative; therefore, please do not choose a research topic or research process for which you will propose to conduct qualitative research – qualitative research is beyond the scope of this course.
Third, you will need to describe in details the type of study you will conduct, your participants in the study, how you will recruit them, what you will measure and how you will measure, your key hypotheses, and your plans of data analyses. In this assignment, you will have to write about your sample size and power for your study, but beyond that, we do not require you to do any data analyses as such.
Finally, in your research proposal, you will not have to write about budget or timeline. We do not need that information. Please stick to the sections outlined below and stick to the word limit.
You will need to write about 1500 words - this means you can write fewer words but not more than 2000 words. Two thousand words will be roughly four pages in double spaced typed pages. The word count excludes words contained in the tables, figures, and references. All words included in the title, sections and paragraphs will be included towards your word count. The word count also excludes words in your survey instrument if you want to include your survey instrument in the research proposal.
The Assignment must be submitted as PDF at Learn by the due date (that is, 23rd March, 2017). The Learn submission site will open on the 16th of March for submission and close on the 23rd of March. No other form of submission will be allowed. Your assignment must consist of the following sections: title, your student ID next to your title, goals and objectives of the research, background information detailing in at least three paragraphs what is the current state of knowledge of the key problem you want to address, what is missing or not known about the key problem that you are proposing to work on, and what you will do about it, and details of the methods. All facts that you will state in your document must be backed up by attribution to a source such as a URL or hyperlink (you must state the full URL of the hyperlink clearly on your document), or in the form of a citation. You must follow the library website for how to insert citations and references in your document. For more information, see the following page,
Second Assessment Track A (optional), 50%, due: 27th April, 2017
The purpose of this assessment is to demonstrate how well you have learned the principles of data preprocessing and simple analyses. In this assignment, you will need to:
select one of the data sets we have provided here
read a data set into your statistical data analysis software (we use Stata)
prepare tables of individual variables
graph the variables individually and in pairs
describe the variables, including their missing values, outliers, and abnormal values
clean up the data set
rerun the tables of the variables so that you have variables with and without cleaning the data sets
write a report in the form of a commentary on the basis of your data cleaning exercise
The length of this Assignment should not exceed 1500 words, excluding words contained in tables, figures, and references. You must submit a PDF document through Learn by the due date, that is, 27th April, 2017. As in the first assignment, you will need to state source of all your facts, and you will need to include the following sections in your report:
A title for your report
Your Student ID in the next line following your title of the report
A section titled “Introduction” where you will describe the data set, where it came from and other relevant information
A section titled, “Steps of Preprocessing the Data” and outline the steps you took to identify missing values, outliers, and abnormal values with notes as to why they were missing, how much were missing, or why certain values were deemed abnormal, and what did you do with them. This section must contain tables and descriptive figures and graphs.
A section titled, “Cleaned Data Set” and present another set of tables, and figures to show the differences between raw data and now preprocessed data. This section will contain descriptions of variables you obtained after cleaning the data sets and outline differences between the raw data and the cleaned data
Second Assessment, Track B (Optional), 50%, due date: 1st June, 2017
The purpose of this assignment will be to demonstrate that you can read data sets, read and interpret relevant health research, critique them, and on the basis of your data analysis, you can write a report to summarise your interpretations of health data. In this assignment you will:
Read a data set. This data set can be the same data set you worked with in your second assignment, or you could read a new data that you identify yourself.
Clean and analyse the data set. If you have already cleaned the data set in the Second Assignment and have a clean data set, proceed with the cleaned data set. Otherwise, you will need to clean the data set and then start analysis of data
Frame your research question and hypotheses that you will use the data set to answer your questions. You will need to first state your hypotheses before your can start your data analysis. Identify which variables will be used to address your hypotheses
Conduct single variable and multivariate data analysis to address the question you posed to the data set
Write a report outlining the key issues, the processes of data analysis, the results, and add a discussion section.
The length of the Assignment must not exceed 2000 words. The report must have the following sections:
Title. – The title must be express the theme of the report. Think of your title as a very tiny summary of the paper. Write your Student ID in the line next to the or below the title
Abstract. – A 100 word limit abstract that will contain the key messages in the paper.
Introduction. – Write in three subsections. Write the nature of the problem that you have addressed in this paper in the first subsection, what is not known or how a data set like the one you have used can address the problem in the second subsection, and a summary of how you have addressed that knowledge gap using this data set in the third subsection
Methods. – In this section, write where did you get the data. Describe and paraphrase the research that was done to generate the data on which you worked, and steps you took to create the tables and graphs that you have created in this paper.
Findings. – In this section, write or paraphrase the tables and the figures that you have created and their key messages. Be careful not to repeat the information that are already presented in the tables but just point to them.
Discussion. – In this section, summarise the key findings in the findings section as the first paragraph, and then in the subsequent sections, describe the important of these findings and significance of the findings.
The length of this assignment document is 2000 words or less. This word count excludes words contained in the tables (caption and body of the table), figures (captions), appendix (supporting data that you will present), references (all words in the references). Otherwise, all words in the section headings, and paragraphs will be counted. Submit just one PDF document in Learn by the specified date. The Learn submission box will be open from 24th May till 1st June for submission. You will not have to write a cover sheet, and do not submit in any other format. Do not submit a hard copy.