1. Introduction to Study Skills and Research Methods
Unit Code: HL10040
Unit Leader: Dr James Betts

2. Lecture Schedule Tuesdays 1115 All in room 8W 1.1 (i.e. here)
Weeks 1-9.
Reading for next week:
Greenhalgh 2006 (at least Ch. 3 & 4)

3. Lecture Schedule Week Topic 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Recognising Research
Descriptive Statistics I
Descriptive Statistics II
Reliability and Validity
Measurement Errors
Hypothesis Testing
Mid-Term Test
Revision Session

4. Computer Laboratory Classes (weeks 2-10)
Mondays 1215 am
Room EB 0.7
Mondays 1315 pm
Room 1E 3.9
Surnames A-G (SES)
Surnames H-O (SES)
Surnames P-Z (SES)
Surnames A-Z (HES)

5. Information Retrievals
CPU Lab Schedule
Week
Topic 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Computer Skills I
Computer Skills II
Literature Searching
Information Retrievals
Introduction to SPSS
Descriptive Statistics
Normal Distribution
Inferential Statistics I
Inferential Statistics II.

6. Seminars and Tutorials
These are scheduled for on Mondays or Thursdays
Exact time and location dependent on personal tutor
Seminars in weeks 4, 7 & 10 (PG)
Tutorials in weeks 5, 8 & 11 (Personal Tutor)
Topics:
‘Critically Evaluating Scientific Literature’

7. Seminars and Tutorials
These are scheduled for on Tuesdays at 0915
Exact time and location dependant on personal tutor
Seminars in weeks 4, 7 & 10 (PG)
Tutorials in weeks 5, 8 & 11 (Personal Tutor)
Topics:
‘Referencing Styles’

8. Seminars and Tutorials
These are scheduled for on Tuesdays at 0915
Exact time and location dependant on personal tutor
Seminars in weeks 4, 7 & 10 (PG)
Tutorials in weeks 5, 8 & 11 (Personal Tutor)
Topics:
‘Scientific Writing’

10. Assessment Mid-Term Test (40%)
A variety of short answer questions covering the lecture material delivered up to week 6.
Coursework (60%)
A range of research scenarios will be described to you in week 6 (7th November)
You will need to review the area of investigation, analyse the data and evaluate the research design.

11. Scientific ‘Truth’ -Women expend >50,000 kcal during childbirth
-Your body is made up of 10 x more microbes than human cells
-The gastrointestinal tract is the largest endocrine organ
@markmccarthyoxf: Its often said we each have 10x as many bugs as "human" cells. How a "made-up" figure went viral and became "fact"
CITED as 1:10 but actually no idea – in realy could be approximately equal or could be that there are more than 100 x more bugs in our system than human cells
50,000 kcal is more than many people consume ina month – could easily exceed the total number of calories a lean woman has stored as fat and carbohydrate and, even if they could metabolise all that energy at sucha rate (ie labour might be 24 h or so – in which case they are expending about 35 kcal per minute – above that at the end of a max test) – a colleague in engineering calculated average body surface area for me and suggested they may then spontaneously combust due to the rate of heat production exceeding our ability to dissipate it.
Adipose tissue is an endocrine organ and can have a mass/volume greater than all the other tissues in the body combined.

12. 1 - Does smoking cause cancer?
Research Questions:
1 - Does smoking cause cancer?
2 - Is it safer to give birth at home or in hospital?
3 - Does regular breakfast facilitate weight-loss?
4 - Does homeopathy alleviate backache?
5 - Does the MMR vaccine cause autism?
6 - Do Statins reduce heart disease risk?
7 – Is cranial osteopathy necessary for new-borns?
Organise them into groups of 4 or 5
Direct them to go away independently and read on their group topic but arrange to meet as a group during the lecture time next week to begin developing a one-page research proposal describing (in detail) how they would plan to address their research question.
This single sheet of A4 should then be posted under my office door before the end of that same week
I will then evaluate these and use your ideas to inform the content of all future lectures.
I know these aren’t SES-related but I have done that purposefully to achieve the goals of this task, primarily because these are likely to be topics of which you won’t yet have extensive personal experience.

13. Possible Considerations: -Study Population (who, how many & why?)
-Experimental Design (what to compare & how?)
-Context (where, when & why?)
-Intervention (define and justify)
-Outcomes (define and justify)
-Sources of Bias
-Ethics
Here are just a few suggestions for elements of experimental design which you might want to think about…
i.e. some of these may not be appropriate or relevant to your research question and, equally, this list is definitely not comprehensive, so you will need to think of various other issues to consider and I urge you to be as detailed as possible in describing your methodology.
Regarding this final point, hopefully it is fairly clear to most of you that, for example, the issue of smoking and cancer cannot be answered by forcing a group of children to smoke for forty years…

14. Strangely, however, you would be surprised how this has been exactlky the approach that scientists have taken in the past, even as recently as the 1970s!!!
This story from just last week documents a public apology by the US government for purposely infecting Guatemalans will syphilis. Apparently, this study started in Alabama in 1930 when they decided to monitor a group of around 400 men with syphilis who were neither told of this fact nor treated. This went on until 1972 when a reported lookd into why people were still dying of syphilis even though effective treatments were well established by that time. In fact, effective antibiotics were readily available even by 1940, yet instead of stopping their study these scientists purposely infected more patients in order to compare treated and untreated groups!

15. J.Betts@bath.ac.uk @DrBSteamjets