Managing the impossible: Building skills for primary data analysis from a distance

The Council on Linkages has identified qualitative and quantitative data analysis skills as core competencies for public health professionals. Key analytical and assessment skills include using methods and instruments for collecting valid and reliable data, interpreting data, making community-specific inferences from quantitative and qualitative data, and using information technology to collect, store, and retrieve data. Although MPH students may take research methods and biostatistics courses, these classes usually do not provide opportunities for students to use a hands-on approach for collecting, analyzing, and reporting primary data. While a graduate thesis or project may provide students with an opportunity to build competencies in critical analytical data skills; a significant number of graduate MPH programs use a comprehensive exam as the required academic culminating experience and provide no opportunity to apply data analysis skills. To meet this challenge, we designed an applied data analysis course to build analytical quantitative and qualitative data competencies among MPH students who do not have the opportunity to conduct community-based research as part of the academic curriculum in a CEPH accredited community health education MPH program. A bigger challenge, however, is how to increase student data analysis skills during a 7-week distance learning course, considering the issues of logistics, time, and expense. This presentation will describe how distance students use Internet technology to devise a sampling frame, adopt a video intervention, administer a pre-and post-test survey and make inferences about collected data. The use of quantitative and qualitative data analysis software for analyzing data will be discussed.