NCI has developed two online resources for use in selecting instruments for various research questions: the Dietary Assessment Primer and the Measures Registry. Both are designed to provide knowledge transfer and facilitate adoption of best assessment practices. This webinar describes each of these resources with a focus on how we can minimize measurement error by opening up access to the best assessment methods.
Dr. Amy Kilbourne introduces the SMART design as well as other adaptive design variations to inform the development of adaptive interventions. Dr. Kilbourne explains the use of the designs in intervention trials, walks through their applicability to implementation studies, discusses differences between adaptive designs and adaptive interventions, and concludes with examples from her work of how adaptive designs have permitted the testing of implementation strategies.
This webinar introduces the SPADES platform which offers simple, uniform, and rapid ways for researchers and clinicians to collect, store, and analyze high resolution signals on physiologic, inertial, and location data. SPADES is a multi-tier, cloud-based service hosted on the highly scalable Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Jennifer Croswell demonstrates methods to critically assess the quality of published systematic reviews of clinical or public health interventions.
Part one of the two-part series, Measuring Success in Low-Income Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Programs, explores how to use the framework to evaluate nutrition education and obesity prevention programs.
Part two, Strategies and Tools for Measuring the Priority Indicators, highlights the seven SNAP-Ed priority indicators from the Evaluation Framework and shares practical examples of measuring healthy eating behaviors, physical activity, and reduced sedentary behaviors in low-income children and families.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Monica Taljaard explains the unique characteristics of the stepped wedge cluster randomized design and its implications for sample size calculation and analysis, and discusses its strengths and weaknesses compared to traditional designs. Emphasis is on application, with examples in disease prevention and health promotion research.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. William Shadish reviews illustrative studies that demonstrate the direction such work is taking and the results that seem to be emerging in regard to nonrandomized control group designs, regression discontinuity designs, and interrupted time series designs.
This Methods: Mind the Gap webinar reviews the design and analysis considerations for assessing the implementation and impact of laws and policies on community, organizational, and individual-level outcomes.
Drs. Lori Ducharme, Hendricks Brown, and Brian Mittman review some of the key concepts discussed at the 6th Annual NIH Meeting on Advancing the Science of Dissemination & Implementation Research: Focus on Study Designs. Central to their discussion are the key issues for study design for implementation science, what works, and opportunities that remain ahead.
They are joined by Drs. Geoffrey Curran, Linda Collins, and Ken Wells in a wide-ranging discussion of common problems encountered by implementation researchers and four examples of study designs and the problems they address.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Walsh presents preventive strategies that integrate clinical data science, informatics, and mental health expertise in an attempt to prevent suicidal thoughts and behaviors. He explains basic concepts in applied predictive modeling relevant to an audience interested in disease prevention. He also shares examples of active research and operational efforts in this domain in civilian and active duty military environments.
The objective of this course is to provide a thorough grounding in the conduct of randomized clinical trials to researchers and health professionals interested in developing competence in the planning, design, and execution of randomized clinical trials involving behavioral interventions.
The curriculum will enable participants to:
- Describe the principles underlying the conduct of unbiased clinical trials
- Identify the unique challenges posed by behavioral randomized clinical trials (RCTs)
- Evaluate RCT designs in terms of their appropriateness to scientific and clinical goals
- Select appropriate strategies for enrollment, randomization, and retention of participants
- Understand methods for monitoring, coordinating, and conducting RCTs
- Develop strategies for appropriate statistical analyses of RCT data
- Evaluate the quality of behavioral RCTs and interpret their results
- Design an RCT as part of a working group on a specific topic.
Dr. Sterman discusses systems approaches in public health, including the concepts of policy resistance, implementation feedbacks, and model boundaries and explores how these ideas can be applied to effect change in a complex system. He includes examples from healthcare and public health such as implementation of formulary drug lists and SARS epidemic modeling.
Dr. McLeroy discusses adoption of systems methodology, including multiple levels of analysis, utility for identifying points of change, testing models against reality, and applications to program evaluation and various research designs, including community-based participatory research and randomized clinical trials.
Systems Network Analysis: Using Connections and Structures to Understand and Change Health Behaviors
Dr. Faust presents a non-technical overview of methods used to analyze networks, with an emphasis on social networks. Topics include: formal representations of social networks (graphs and sociomatrices), social network data considerations, and methods for analyzing social networks (connectivity, centrality, cohesive subgroups, equivalences and blockmodels, subgraphs, and structural hypotheses).
Dr. Valente describes methods for using network analysis to elucidate the antecedents and consequences of health-related behaviors. To do this, he draws from a number of examples of his applied work in the areas of substance abuse prevention and treatment, contraceptive choices, and community coalitions, among others. He also describes how applied research utilizing network analysis methods can be used to stimulate improvement in individual, community, and organizational behavior change programs.
This series of online lectures covers a range of diverse topics in data science such as data management, data representation, computing, data modeling, and other overarching topics. This series is an introductory overview that assumes no prior knowledge or understanding of data science.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap presentation, Dr. Selvin discusses the importance of epidemiologic evidence in informing strategies and cut points for screening and diagnosis of diabetes. A focus is on the evidence supporting the importance of the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) test and current controversies regarding screening and diagnosis of prediabetes.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Dr. Karen Emmons and Dr. Lawrence Green discuss the interface between public health and implementation science, past, present, and future.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Kay Dickersin reviews models of how systematic reviews are being used globally to plan, implement, and derive recommendations from comparative effectiveness research (CER). She also reviews some of the existing challenges to using systematic reviews and methods being used to address these challenges.
Time-varying effect modeling (TVEM) is a novel method that enables health, behavioral, and social scientists to examine developmental (i.e., age-varying) and dynamic (i.e., time-varying) associations. In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Stephanie Lanza discusses potential research questions that can be addressed using TVEM, and provides resources for researchers interested in using the models in their own work.
The series provides an overview of analytic approaches, methods, and statistical applications for analyzing tobacco regulatory science (TRS) data. The presenters include an esteemed group of scientists, well known for their work in methodological research dealing with casual inference. The webinars are intended for any investigator funded by the Center for Tobacco Products.
During this webinar, participants learn more about The Community Guide and activities underway to help communities use evidence-based recommendations and findings found in The Community Guide to take action and implement community health improvement activities in collaboration with health departments and other community partners.