PUBH620: Biostatistics Assessment
- Subject Code :
PUBH620
- University :
Australian Catholic University Exam Question Bank is not sponsored or endorsed by this college or university.
- Country :
Australia
Background
This assessment task uses the Longitudinal Survey of ACU Student Health and Wellbeing, a (fictional) cohort study involving a survey administered to students on enrolment with ACU (first year baseline) and selected follow up data (during third year). For this task, you will use what you have learnt from Assessment Task 1A and 1B and write-up the results presenting it in a suitable format for submission to the Medical Journal of Australia. You have the choice to write your paper using your results from:
OPTION 1: Road traffic accidents OR OPTION 2:Depression and obesity
Please take note that you ONLY have to complete:
- A brief introduction, then
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion and Conclusion
- References (APA7)
sections of the paper. Completing an abstract for this assessment task is optional and will not net you additional marks however, completing an abstract will help you to better understand the context of the paper you are writing.
Assessment Task 2: MJA manuscript
Write-up Instructions
For this assessment task, you will present your results for your chosen option (OPTION 1 ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS OR OPTION 2 DEPRESSION AND OBESITY) in the format of a manuscript suitable for submission to the Medical Journal of Australia.
The two original papers that this assessment task is based off are:
- Option 1: Age and gender differences in risk-taking behaviour as an explanation for high incidence of motor vehicle crashes as a driver in young males by Cathy Turner & Rod McClure.
- Option 2: A prospective study of the role of depression in the development and persistence of adolescent obesity by Elizabeth Goodman and Robert Whitaker.
You are strongly encouraged to refer to the example MJA paper that is provided to give you a guide on how to write your paper.
Lim, S. M., Allard, N. L., Devereux, J., Cowie, B. C., Tydeman, M., Miller, A., ... & Maier, A. (2022). The COVID Positive Pathway: a collaboration between public health agencies, primary care, and metropolitan hospitals in Melbourne. Medical Journal of Australia, 216(8), 413-419.
For this assessment task, it will be necessary for you to follow the Journals standard instructions for authors, noting that:
- You do not need to draft a covering letter or complete the downloadable conflict of interest statement only the manuscript portion (using the modified MJA template which has been provided).
- Your submission will be a Research Original Research type of article (of 1,500 words only).
- You should follow the guidelines and other requirements of the MJA (Do note however, that you are required to use APA7 and NOT Vancouver referencing) remember, part of your assessment is the degree to which you meet these requirements.
Purpose of assessment task
The major purpose of this assessment task is to consolidate the various aspects of this course (critical appraisal of research, statistical methods) in a way that represents something useful for you in your professional practice. Even if you are not involved in research in the future, you will always be using the results of research to guide your work (this is known as the basis of evidence-based practice). As such, you need to be cognisant of how research is written up, and this task provides you with the opportunity to gain experience on how this is done.
The following guidance is provided about content and writing:
Brief Introduction
- For your introduction, do not simply state that you are replicating the study, and/or just paraphrase the given example (original) paper. You should include a short original discussion about what the issue under consideration is (road traffic accidents or depression/obesity) and why it is an important public health consideration.
- You should create aims/objectives to your study, and state these at the end of the introduction.
- The word count associated with this section will be relatively small compared to the results/discussion sections.
Methods
- Your method section will be brief, as your methods are described elsewhere in the similar papers that have been provided. You should only include a brief description of the method as it relates to baseline/third year data collection.
- You should also include some brief detail on the statistical methods used in your analysis. This will reflect your understanding of the statistical methods used.
- You should include a brief discussion of how your measures/variables are similar or different to those of the study option you are replicating. You will find information about this in the original paper, and you are encouraged to refer to that paper in your introduction, method and discussion sections.
- You need to state that your study was approved by the ACU Ethical Research Committee (fictional)you will see that this is an important thing to note in writing research papers.
- Remember, data collection occurs for first year (baseline) and then during third year (follow-up) this is relevant for both options. You should make up a brief general description of how you think the study was carried out ie. Explain how the data was collected and refer to any relevant research designs that were used.
Results
- This will include some of the procedures you used in Assessment Task 1A and 1B. The point now is to write it up in the format of a journal article. Please do not just copy and paste the SPSS output tablesyou will get zero marks for doing this.
Discussion
- Remember, you are building on the original study (provided in the attached papers above (Option 1 crashes OR Option 2 obesity), using a similar method of analysis (but with a different dataset) to see if the relationships that were found in the example study hold up in your data. You will not necessarily have thesame findings this is either due to differences in the measures used or entirely different relationships in the ACU population. In your discussion, you should compare and contrast your findings to those of the original paper.
Additional resources
You will find the following resources of great assistance in preparing your MJA manuscript:
- MJA Instructions for Authors materials: as above, see also the MJA style page
- Example paper from MJA as an example of the overall writing style (and content) of a paper.
SPSS instructions
Please provide answers for the corresponding questions in accordance with your option choice:
Option 1 If you have chosen to do the road traffic accident study, complete questions 1, 2, 3 and 5 below
Option 2 If you have chosen to do the depression and obesity study, complete questions 1, 2, 4 and 6 below
New value | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Description | student aged 18years at time of enrolment | student aged 19to21 at time of enrolment | student aged 22to 25 at time of enrolment | student aged 26 or more at time of enrolment |
Hint: all other values (<18>
- In your SPSS file, age (at time of enrolment) is given as a continuous variable.
- What is the mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values for age?
- Some students enrol before their 18th birthday, potentially confounding this analysis of longterm driving behaviour (for the RTA study) or generally creating ethical issues around recruitment of children and consent (for the depression/obesity study). It is therefore necessary to consider only those aged 18 and over, and to make data for those under 18 years of age missing. Please recode age into a new variable (named age_category) using this guide:
- Create table(s) of descriptive statistics for the demographic information of the students in this dataset (sample size n, mean and % values where appropriate). The demographic variables are cohort, state, age, gender living arrangement, faculty, degree type, metro, study mode and fee status. As a guide you may find the tables in the paper by Keijzers et al. (2011) helpful when presenting your demographic information. Then, provide a brief description of your findings that informs the reader about the ACU cohort.
- Test if the mean for aggression, thrill seeking and risk acceptance scores differ for the following demographics and provide a brief interpretation of your findings:
- Gender
- Metropolitan background status
- Study mode
- RTA in past 12 months (from follow-up survey)
- In terms of depression, is there a difference between the depressed and not depressed groups according to their:
- Gender
- Metropolitan background status
- Study mode
- Fee status
- Using RTA_one_crash as the dependent variable, perform a binary logistic regression using the following predictor variables relating to the RTA study:
Type variable Demographic Age (using newly-created variable) gender living arrangements (enter as categorical varible) domestic/international status Driving driving distance (avg per week) Behaviour aggression thrill-seeking risk-acceptance - Provide a table of odds ratios, confidence intervals and significance values for each predictor variable.
- How do you interpret the findings for living arrangements?
- Provide a preliminary interpretation and conclusion about the influence of the predictor variables on road traffic accidents. In particular, what is the effect of changes (increase or decrease) in driver aggression on the odds of experiencing a road traffic accident?
- Using OB (obesity at third-year follow-up) as the dependent variable, perform a binary logistic regression using the following predictor variables:
Type Variable Demographic Age gender living arrangement Baseline characterstics overweight or obese at baseline parental factors number of parents with university education presence/absence of obese parents - Provide a table of odds ratios, confidence intervals and significance values for each predictor variable.
- How do you interpret the findings for living arrangements?
- Provide a preliminary interpretation and conclusion about the influence of the predictor variables on obesity at follow-up. In particular, what is the effect of changes (increase or decrease) in the number of parents with university education on the likelihood of later obesity?