Course Details

Biostatistics for health research is a short course introducing the application of biostatistics public health and medicine research. Biostatistics is well used in summarising, analysing, understanding, and interpreting health related data which is crucial for any health and medical research. Almost all health science articles, reports and books heavily rely on Biostatistics.

Every scientific question must undergo scientific judgement, and, in most cases, Biostatistics provides the tools to do that. Irrespective of whether you need to conduct randomized controlled trials or cohort studies or case control studies, it is essential to understand biostatistics to design, conduct, collect and interpret health-related data. The most common principles and methods used in Biostatistics are covered in this short course, including the necessary tools for analysing and interpreting data health related data.

• Discussion on research question, study design, sampling methods, questionnaire, collection of data and data entry into a database;
• Classification of data for utilization of appropriate Statistical tools;
• Visualizing data using appropriate graphs;
• Summarizing data using summary statistics;
• Understanding probability distributions including sampling distributions;
• Understanding the concept of population vs sample and estimation of parameters using sample statistics;
• Quantifying uncertainty in results from a sample and it’s use in Statistical distributions;
• Comparing two or more groups of people using confidence intervals (e.g., 95% confidence interval) and hypothesis tests (p-values) e.g., Independent Sample t test, Paired Sample t test, ANOVA test, Non-parametric tests such as Wilcoxon rank sum test, Wilcoxon signed rank test, Kruskal Walis test, etc.;
• Assessing the association between an outcome (both continuous and categorical) and one or more exposure(s) using the Chi-squared test, Relative risk, Odds ratio, Simple and multiple linear regression analyses and Logistic regression analysis;
• Sample size calculations.

Attendees will also get brief discussion on application of one of the most popular Statistical software called SPSS.