Global Health 811

Teaching Team

• Instructor: Andrew Stokes, PhD
  • Office: Department of Global Health, Crosstown 362
  • Phone: (617) 414-1276
  • Email: acstokes@bu.edu
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays from 5-6pm
• Teaching Assistant: Josh Smith-Sreen
  • Email: jsmithsr@bu.edu
  • Office Hours: by appointment

Time & Location

• Class is held on Thursdays 6:00-8:50 pm Instructional Building 206
• Lab Session: Thursdays 5:00-5:50 pm Instructional Building 206

Prerequisite

Introductory Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Texts

The required text for this class is open access and available at the link provided. To access the free version, select the link and click on open access version.

Required:

• Peter G. Smith. Field Trials of Health Interventions: A Toolbox

Optional:

• CM Varkevisser. Designing and Conducting Health Systems Research.
  • Vol.1: Proposal Development and Fieldwork
  • Vol.2: Data Analysis and Report Writing
• Howard S. Becker. Writing for Social Scientists. 2nd Edition. 2007

Software

We will be making use of a variety of software in this class for designing and fielding surveys, cleaning and analyzing data, report writing and managing bibliographic information. You may ask why these and not others? For bibliographic management, perhaps you have heard of or used Endnote. For data analyses, you might be familiar with Stata, SAS or Matlab. However, in this class the aim is to rely as much as possible on free and open access software programs. There are many advantages to doing so, including the increased practicality of these tools for work in low-income settings.

Required:

• Kobo Toolbox
• Mendeley
• R
• RStudio

Optional:

• R Markdown
• NVivo

Resources for Learning R

Texts

• Roger D. Peng. R Programming for Data Science
• Roger D. Peng. Exploratory Data Analysis with R
• Brian Caffo. Regression Models for Data Science in R
• Hadley Wickham. 2015. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Some of the content is available for free here.
• Winston Chang. 2013. R Graphics Cookbook.

You can learn more about Leanpub, the publisher of the books by Roger Peng and Brian Caffo, here. Leanpub uses a variable pricing model, which means you choose how much you want to pay. The suggested price is around $10-15 but the books are all available for free (use the scroll bar to choose the price).

Websites

• R Bloggers. How to Learn R
• UCLA. Resources to help you learn and use R
• Cookbook for R
• Marin Stats. R video tutorials

Blackboard

All assignments will be submitted using the Blackboard course website.

Special thanks to Mary Bachman DeSilva and Matt Salganik for inspiration on website content and design