Research skills short courses
Griffith University
Grant Writing Workshop
This course is aimed at people with little or no experience at grant writing and will help them to develop a competitive grant to conduct a research project of relevance to primary health care.
The course provides a practical approach to preparing a grant application for research funding. Topics covered include:
a) Development of the research question and justification of its importance
b) Choosing the appropriate funding agency and collaborators
c) Dissection of the essential components of a competitive grant proposal and discussion of ways to write effectively for each component
d) The features of a good and bad proposal
e) General tips to increase chances of getting funded, including ways to respond to reviewers comments and writing styles.
Statistics for Critical Appraisal of Health Research
This course is suitable for health care professionals who want to develop their skills in evidence based practice or those who are involved in or planning a research project. The course is less suited to people with no prior knowledge in statistics or those with a high level of experience in bio-statistics. However it is an opportunity to refresh your knowledge of statistical methods in the critical appraisal of health research literature.
Week 1: Study Designs: Describes different types of experimental & observational studies and relevant sampling methods for each study design.
Week 2: Estimation: Describes different types of data and how to summarise the data, measuring variability, distributions, confidence intervals, and sampling error.
Week 3: Tests of Significance: Describes significant testing for different types of data. Including hypothesis testing, p-values, and type 1 & 2 errors; also chi-squared and non-parametric tests.
Week 4: Clinical Measurement: Describes tests for comparisons of risks. Also to discuss diagnostic tests and sensitivity and specificity testing. Will summarise and review topics
covered in the course.
The course draws on examples from health related journal articles to discuss the application of study designs and interpretation of the statistical methods described above.
About the Trainer: Robert Ware has been teaching medical statistics to UQ students and QLD Health staff since 2003. He gained his PhD in numerical approximation in Christchurch in 2002 and is currently employed as a Lecturer with the University of Queensland School of Population Health, where he works on a wide range of applied statistics problems with colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds.
Bond University
For information on Bond courses please contact Treasure Hodgetts on Ph: (07) 5595 4411.
University of Queensland
For information on UQ courses please contact Sharon Sanders (07) 3365 5394.
Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated
ACSPRI conducts summer, winter and special training programs offering courses in social research methods and research technology. The courses are conducted through various Universities located throughout Australia and are designed to cater for fundamental, changing and emerging research strategies.
Primary Health Care Research and Information Service
The PHCRIS Events Diary provides information about upcoming workshops, conferences and events.