This introductory course covers the basic elements of questionnaire design and question wording. Learn how to construct unbiased questions – the common mistakes and how to put them together in a survey and/or interview schedule that will be easily answered. The different requirements for postal and interview questionnaires as well as online surveys will be emphasised and practical exercises will be given in question wording. Obtaining consent for surveys will also be covered. Various modes of presentation will be described. Some suggestions for ways of improving response rates will also be given. The course is taught by an experienced researcher and tips and advice will be given for specific surveys. After the course participants will be able to send their questionnaires for review by CSTAR/CSCS consultants when constructed.
A Guide to Critical Appraisal and Systematic Reviews for Doctors & other Health Professionals
One day course 09:15-16:30
The objective of this course is to understand the meaning of evidence-based medicine and the importance of critical appraisal skills and the conduct of systematic reviews.
At the end of this workshop you should be able to:
Identify different study designs
Evaluate the methodology of any study for strengths and weaknesses
Understand how to choose a statistical test to analyse data and be able to interpret the results of any study
Know what pitfalls to look for in analyses when checking their validity
Decide whether to change clinical practice based on the results of a study
Decide whether results are valid and can be used to inform a further research study
Carry out a systematic review on a specific focused question
Judge whether a meta-analysis is a feasible/valid possibility
Consider being part of a Cochrane Collaboration on a specified topic
This course provides an intensive introduction to SPSS. SPSS is a very easy to use statistical software. It is available for free to anyone working or studying on any University campus. This course assumes that participants have a basic familiarity with the Windows environment. We examine the features of SPSS for Windows, use a simple data set to cover the topics of transforming variables, selecting data for analysis, then perform basic analyses to produce frequency distributions, summary statistics and cross tabulations before examining some of the extensive graphic capabilities of SPSS. This course would provide an introduction to anyone wishing to analyse their own data using SPSS. N.B. You should only go on this course if you have or are likely to have access to the SPSS software – available UL but only some depts UHL/HSE.
We will provide details before the course for downloading the software and you may need to bring your laptop to the course. This course is taught by an experienced statistician – advice can be sought during the day for specific SPSS problems. Those with sufficient statistical knowledge already would only need to go on this course in order to carry out any analyses.
R – a freely available version of the S programming language is becoming more and more popular as a statistical analysis package. R can be freely downloaded from the web and provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques. R enables the user to have more control over the algorithms used to analyse data and therefore facilitates more sophisticated analyses than allowed by other packages, e.g. SPSS, Minitab, etc. There is also a wealth of support to users on the internet with freely downloadable routines that can be used for specific purposes. It is becoming very popular amongst statisticians and other researchers e.g. within the business. medical and economics fields. We will give full instructions on downloading R before running the course and you may need to bring your laptop to the course.
This course will serve as an introduction to the package and its uses at a very elementary level. A high level of statistical knowledge will not be assumed.
This course is taught by an experienced statistician – advice can be sought during the day for specific research/analyses queries.
Announcing NVivo Workshops in Dublin 3rd & 4th of September, 2020
Enroll for 1 or 2 days
QDA Training are running a two day NVivo Training workshop in Dublin on the 3rd and 4th of September, 2020.
These workshops will be delivered by Ben Meehan. They come with free and unlimited post training, one-to-one online support for each participant for the life of their first project using NVivo, including PhD projects. This personal support is delivered by means of a very user friendly system where the trainer logs on to your computer and works one-to-one with you as you incrementally apply the concepts and technologies taught in the workshop on your live data. Support session are run during the day, in the evenings and on Saturdays. You are not limited by duration or frequency of support sessions. You can have this tuition as often as you deem necessary to optimise your data and use NVivo to demonstrate rigour in your data analysis. The workshop also includes colour printed workbooks, electronic resources, lunch and snacks.
The objective of the course is to equip the group with enough knowledge to enable people to begin their project using a computer-aided methodology. However, they will not possess the requisite skills to carry out more advanced tasks. An intermediate level training day. Day 2 would achieve that end.
Course Outline Day 1 – Introduction to NVIVO – building your qualitative database
Morning
1. Introduction – why use a computer for qualitative analysis? The pros and Cons
2. The theoretical project – a conceptual overview of four key decisions to be made concerning research design as you approach your project
3. A tour of NVIVO (theory applied)
Afternoon
Building your database and coding your data
1. Setting up and backing up your project
2. Importing your data
3. Setting up and linking your demographic/profiling information
4. Creating a coding structure and coding to it
CONTACT
Training delivered by: QDATRAINING Ltd
Pembroke Lane
Dublin 4
Tel Office: 01-4429719
The objective of this workshop is to conduct a piece of analysis using raw data and a research question. By the end of the session, the participants will have:
1.Set up a database with a robust architecture
2.Analysed the data using queries and manual analysis where appropriate
3.Reported on the findings
Research Question
Will the Government win the next general election? If not, why not?
Data collection
Mixed method questionnaire collecting demographics along with quantitative and qualitative questions
Analysis
1. Import Questionnaires 2. Import Quantitative data and match cases 3. Use coding query (simple) to address part 1 of the research question (creating groups)
4. Target a participant set and use coding query (advanced) to group them
5. Auto-code their qualitative responses to a single node
6. Code on their responses to identify reasons for change
7. Export results and report graphically on weighting of themes
8. Share information using “Annotations”
9. Link to the literature using “See Also Links”
10. Generate preliminary findings using “Memos” (proposition/summary statements) Test preliminary findings against demographics to further explore/analyse results using
“Visualisations”
11. Further interrogate data by automated coding by demographic value (gender) using an advanced coding query
12. Use text search to augment manual coding and integrate results
13. Use a compound query to refine searches
14. Use matrix for deeper integration/exploration of relationships within the data
15. Share/report data with non NVivo users using HTML Word and Excel export options
16. Demonstrate “Word Frequency Searches”, “Coding Comparisons Query” and working with PDFs
Open Session
Finally, there will be an open session at the end of the workshop to facilitate people who wish to work with their own data which will also provide the opportunity for a question and answer dialogue where all parties to the workshop can learn from each other.
CONTACT
Training delivered by: QDATRAINING Ltd
Pembroke Lane
Dublin 4
Tel Office: 01-4429719
This course examines how sampling techniques can be applied in survey research. We begin by looking at the role of sampling in the survey process. We introduce the basic principles of sampling theory and how this relates to sampling strategies and sample design in a practical context. Practical exercises address the questions of the required sample size and precision of estimates, sampling strategies and when sample surveys are appropriate. This course, together with the ‘Questionnaire Design’ course above, provides important guidance for any researcher planning a survey.
This will provide an introduction to the basic approaches to exploratory data analysis mainly looking at categorical variables (the variables most often found in questionnaire/survey data). No prior knowledge of statistics is assumed although you will require a basic knowledge of using SPSS and/or other statistical software packages e.g. knowledge gained from the above ‘Introductory SPSS’ course. The course uses sample data from the sciences and social sciences fields but the application is relevant to all subject areas. It covers: ways of exploring variable distributions using tables and charts; use of cross- tabulation and the use of control variables to explore the relationship between categorical variables, chi-squared test & other tests, techniques for recoding and deriving new variables; odds ratios & relative risks, the use of weighting where appropriate. This course is taught by an experienced statistician – advice can be sought during the course for specific research/statistics queries. (It is not advised that this course should be taken together with the Basic Statistics Course as there is much overlapping material)
2020 
Dublin