0305 - Statistical Methods to Improve Health and Human Services Systems: Building the Evidence for Data-driven Approaches
Course Description
This course will focus on the uses of statistical methods to improve health and human services systems. The substantive focus of the course will be understanding how methods can be used to study:
- Changes in drivers of trajectories in individuals' health outcomes over time;
- Understanding how trajectories of changes for different groups can help identify how programs work heterogeneously for different individuals;
- Understand how to evaluate programs using time series methods to study changes in systems (or communities) over time as a result of "interventions as interruptions";
- Understanding the organizational contexts of change;
- Understanding spatial patterns of outcomes using both exploratory and confirmatory methods;
- Understand cracks in the service delivery networks based on changes in unmet needs.
This six session-class will provide gentle introductions to a range of methods including regression methods, varieties of multilevel models, time series analysis, spatial analysis, and network analysis. One of the features of this course is that global leaders in each of these methods are likely to join to briefly highlight key methodological insights.
Each of the sessions will consist of a discussion of the relevance of the evaluation question and an intuitive understanding of the logic of the methodological approach. This will be complemented with a hands-on demonstration of operationalizing the evaluation questions. Both commonly used software (R and SPSS) will be completed with the use of specialized software: Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) will be used for multilevel models, Gretl will be used for time series, Geoda for Spatial analysis, UCINET for network analysis
Facilitators:
Sanjeev Sridharan, Professor of Health Policy Evaluation at the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
Sean Okamoto, Project Technical Director, Telecommunications and Social Informatics Research Program, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa