A collection of online chapters that provide an introduction to selected behavioral and social science research approaches, including theory development and testing, survey methods, measurement, and study design. eSource was developed in 2010, and these chapters have not been updated to reflect advances in the past decade. However, they can still be used as supplementary teaching materials.
This archive provides a collection of webinars on methodology. The topics include HIV prevention, implementation methods, personalized medicine, complexity, and longitudinal data. In 2017, the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) provided co-funding to the Center for Prevention Implementation Methodology to help create this archive.
The NIH-Duke Master's Program in Clinical Research, established in 1998, is one of the nation's first training programs in clinical research. This program allows participants to attend formal courses in research design, research management, medical genomics, and statistical analysis at the Clinical Center by means of video-conferencing from Duke or on-site by adjunct faculty.
The program leads to a Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research, a professional degree awarded by the Duke University School of Medicine. There is also a non-degree option for qualified students who want to pursue specific areas of interest.
Applications will be accepted through August 1, 2020.
In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Linda Collins discusses why behavioral interventions are important in many areas of public health, for example, smoking cessation, drug abuse prevention, treatment of obesity, management of heart failure symptoms, and promotion of physical activity.
Behavioral interventions are typically developed and evaluated using a treatment package approach, in which the intervention is assembled a priori and evaluated by means of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Dr. Collins reviews an alternative approach called the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST), an engineering-inspired framework for developing, optimizing, and evaluating behavioral interventions. MOST includes the RCT, as well as other empirical steps aimed at intervention optimization.
Interventions to change behavior have great potential to improve health and well-being. In this Methods: Mind the Gap webinar, Dr. Michie describes a method for specifying the "active ingredients" of interventions. Such a method allows data pooling to identify effective component techniques. She also presents a systematic method for developing interventions, linking a "behavioral diagnosis" of the behavior needing to be changed with general strategies and specific techniques.
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.