Advances in Mixed and Qualitative Analysis

The growing presences of examples that pair mixed methods with qualitative methodologies like grounded theory where there is a sustained commitment to an exploratory drive have introduced a variety of innovations in the way the methodology is practiced. In this short course, author of three textbooks about mixed methods research with a contemporary orientation, Professor Elizabeth G. Creamer, draws out features of qualitatively oriented mixed methods research by highlighting three mixed analytical procedures: integrative case-based analysis, integrated and joint displays, and blended or mixed themes. Among the goals of the short course is that participants will learn (1) with mixed methods grounded theory as an example, a strategy to dissect the foundational assumptions of two methodologies and the synergies likely to emerge by pairing them, (2) how to integrate data from different sources through case-based analysis, including with visual data, (3) how to construct dynamic joint and integrated displays that serve different purposes, and (4) how to integrate during analysis by generating mixed or blended themes. Participants can benefit from this workshop without much prior exposure to mixed methods research.

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Academic Publishing 101: From Idea to Article...and Beyond

This course will be available online via Zoom. Registration is required to secure your spot. This course will NOT be recorded – attendance is required.

Although graduate school teaches you many things, many PhD students complete their dissertations having never been fully trained in academic publishing. How does academic publishing actually work? Where should you publish your research? How do you actually get papers accepted in strong academic journals? In this talk, we will discuss several major ideas in academic publishing (focusing on the social sciences). We will discuss (1) professional integrity and ethics; (2) the role of academic conversations and communities as a guide for publication forums and journal selections; (3) the mechanics of publishing in journals and other forums (including outlining, writing style, journal, legal, and newspaper submissions, the peer review process, revisions, and corresponding with editors); and (4) acceptance and all that follows.

There will be a 1-hour lunch from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. and (2) 15-minute breaks (one in the morning and one in afternoon).

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Strategies for Improving Public Understanding of FDA and the Products It Regulates…Why Should We Care, and What Might We Do?

This NIH Collaboratory Rethinking Clinical Trials Grand Rounds features:

Susan C. Winckler, RPh, Esq
Chief Executive Officer
Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA

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Introduction to Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a powerful browser-based web-survey tool. It is available to all UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, staff, and students, for UNC-related projects. Qualtrics allows users to build complex surveys, distribute them, and analyze the responses all from one place. This course covers basic Qualtrics functions including creating some of the most common question types, programming display and skip logic, an introduction to “survey flow”, distributing surveys with an anonymous link vs survey mailer, creating and uploading contact lists, project collaboration and creating groups, adding content to Libraries, and downloading data. Other topics include loop and merge as well as preventing fraudulent responses and bot activity.

This is an introductory course and will not cover use of the online analysis tools within Qualtrics. Please note, this is a hands-on course. All participants are required to create a Qualtrics account before the course.

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Methods for Cross Cultural Research

This course will be offered online only. Attendance is required – this course will not be recorded.

Methods for Cross-Cultural Research is a 2.5 hour short-course focused on designing and implementing social science research cross-culturally, with a particular emphasis on collecting interview data. In the face of increasing globalization, concerns for external validity, and the importance of capturing the diversity of human experience, there is a need to consider how to implement research cross-culturally.

In this course, participants will consider different definitions of culture, how research is itself a cultural practice, what perspectives and analytical approaches can be employed in cross-cultural research, as well as best practices in designing and implementing cross-cultural research.

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Introduction to Linear Regression Analysis

This course is designed to develop quantitative research skills with practical applications in social science contexts. It will focus on key topics such as the analysis of ordinary least squares (OLS), methods for estimating bivariate and multivariate regression models, assessing the overall goodness of model fit, and hypothesis and diagnostic tests. Participants will also receive insights into research design, data management, statistical analysis, and interpreting research outcomes.

The course adopts a "learning by doing" approach, delving into major themes in regression analysis through detailed examples. These examples illustrate the practical application of the regression concepts using the statistical program R.

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Dissertation Structure, Organization, and Completion

The Dissertation Structure, Organization, and Completion workshop will focus on a pivotal aspect of doctoral degree completion, the dissertation proposal. Each component of the dissertation proposal defense will be discussed as well as strategies to ensure a successful outcome of this signal event. Workshop participants will learn how academic scholars present research focusing heavily on development of the theoretical framework, conceptual framework and study methodology. The workshop program will share specific academic practices that successful doctoral students employ to describe the proposed area of inquiry and situating the problem in a current context. When strategies and practices are implemented successfully, the dissertation proposal will garner the satisfaction of the dissertation chair, dissertation committee members, and Institutional Review Board.

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The Virus of Racism: Understanding Its Threats and Mobilizing Defenses

The focus of this year’s Black History Month Research Series is mental health, physical health and community interventions. David Williams, chair of Harvard University’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health. Williams, will open the series with a discussion of racism, the multiple ways it operates in society, and its profound consequences on health. Sponsored by the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work.

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Pragmatic Recruitment of Underrepresented Groups – Experience From the Diuretic Comparison Project

This NIH Collaboratory Rethinking Clinical Trials Grand Rounds features:

Cynthia Hau, MPH
Statistician
Boston Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center
VA Boston Healthcare System

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Fluent in two or more languages? Interested in interpretation? Come learn about roles, trainings, and tips for becoming an interpreter. This webinar is focused on spoken languages, not sign languages. Interpretation will be provided in English and Spanish. Sponsored by the Language Access Collaborative, an initiative of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Cultivating Health: Leveraging Microbial Ecology for Women’s Health Innovation

Join the Children's Research Institute for a hybrid seminar with Indriati Hood Pishchany, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in pediatric infectious diseases at UNC School of Medicine. Participate in the seminar either in person at 3116 Mary Ellen Jones Building (with lunch provided) or via Zoom.

Zoom information - Meeting ID: 985 6644 6544 | Password: 097476

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This course is being offered in collaboration between the Odum Institute and the Center for Urban & Regional Studies.

This one-day course will be offered via Zoom only. Attendance is required as it will not be recorded.

Course Summary:
This course offers a broad introduction into the use of geospatial data in data science applications.  The course will be highly focused on what makes geospatial data different from other types of data and what these differences imply for using and applying geospatial data.  The course materials will be built for non-geospatial professionals who find themselves needing to use geospatial data effectively. 

Why Take This Course?
The availability and uses of geospatial data have been growing for decades.  Recently, with the advent of robust web-mapping and dynamic client-side web tools many data analysts, applications programmers, web developers, and data scientists of all types have been confronted with geospatial data without having a background in geography or Geographic Information Systems (GIS).  This course will ground students in fundamental concepts of geospatial data science, geospatial computing, and geospatial applications so they can be more efficient and accurate in using geospatial data in their daily jobs.

Participants will learn about:
- Basics of map projections and the use of projected and un-projected geospatial data
- How issues of scale, precision, and accuracy affect applications of geospatial data 
- Geospatial data models and the main ways geospatial data is presented in computer form 
- Key open-source and commercial off-the-shelf applications that handle geospatial data 

Prerequisites: 
Basic computer skills.  An understanding of tools such as spreadsheets, relational database management systems (RDMS), and programming will be beneficial, but not required. 

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Identify, Bid, and Win Federal Contract Opportunities

The Office of Research Development is hosting a webinar for UNC investigators and staff to learn more about federal contract opportunities, including: the differences of contract work versus grant, the approach to procuring contract funds versus PI-initiated grants, funding cycles for contract work, and UNC campus resources available to support your teams.

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Towards a More Holistic Conceptualization of Mental Health Among Black Populations

The second discussion in the SSW's Black History Month series features Theda Rose and Camille Quinn in a discussion on mental health. Current thinking about mental health remains, for the most part, pathology based; however, the absence of disorder alone is insufficient to characterize mental health. This panel will offer holistic models of mental health that incorporate well-being and pathology along with highlights of socio-ecological factors associated with this broader conceptualization of mental health.

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Clinical Implications of the MINT Trial

This NIH Collaboratory Rethinking Clinical Trials Grand Rounds features:

Jeffrey Carson, MD, MACP
Principal Investigator and Study Chair, MINT Trial
Provost-New Brunswick, Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences
Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Richard C. Reynolds, M.D. Chair in General Internal Medicine
Rutgers, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

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Intermediate Qualtrics

This course will cover topics beyond the scope of the Introduction to Qualtrics short course. Take a deeper dive into “Survey Flow” features, including routing with branches, embedded data, customizing the “End of Survey” experience, and randomization. Explore embedded data, and several ways to import or set data in your survey through contact list fields, anonymous URLs, and conditions within your survey. Additional topics will include piping, authentication, managing results, re-coding values, exporting and importing data, and creating reports.

This is a hands-on course. Completion of Introduction to Qualtrics or understanding basic Qualtrics principles prior to this course is required. All participants are required to create a Qualtrics account before the course.

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This course will be held over two-days (2/20/2024 AND 2/22/2024), 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. ET each day. Attendance is required as this class will not be recorded.

This course focuses on best practices for writing questions and visual design for surveys, with a focus on holistic designs in which question wording and visual design work together to produce good measurement. It draws on the empirical literature to provide practical guidelines for questionnaire design and considers mixed-mode and mixed-device surveys. The course will include PowerPoint slides and whole group and small group discussion.

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NC TraCS Data Science Seminar Series: Missing Death Data—Enhancing Record Linkage with Machine Learning

Dates of patient death and associated metadata are a known issue for electronic health records, as deaths that occur outside the care system tend to be missing. One approach to this problem is to supplement EHR data by linking to external death records, but this comes with a significant challenge: linking records and managing identity resolution. In this seminar, the TraCS Data Science Lab will review the state death data linkage work that has existed at UNC for many years and introduce the addition of a machine learning classification to optimize match resolution.

Speaker:
JP Powers, PhD
Research Data Scientist
NC TraCS Institute

The NC TraCS Data Science Seminar Series will be held on the third Tuesday of each month. These 1-hour sessions will cover a range of topics broadly applicable to healthcare data science. While some sessions will focus on organizational aspects of starting or getting involved in data science and AI healthcare research at UNC, other sessions will focus on technical aspects of data architecture and modeling, programming, or application of machine learning methods.

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The UNC School of Data Science and Society is hosting a flash talk networking event to stimulate connections and innovative research in data science across Carolina. Such connections could lead to new research activities funded by SDSS's rolling seed grants. Join for lunch, meet colleagues and learn about the rolling seed grant program available through SDSS.

Space is limited with attendance priority granted to registrants that have prepared a 3-minute single slide flash talk describing a problem that data science can help solve OR current research. Must be a staff researcher or faculty to attend.

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This course will be held over two-days (2/20/2024 AND 2/22/2024), 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. ET each day. Attendance is required as this class will not be recorded.

This course focuses on best practices for writing questions and visual design for surveys, with a focus on holistic designs in which question wording and visual design work together to produce good measurement. It draws on the empirical literature to provide practical guidelines for questionnaire design and considers mixed-mode and mixed-device surveys. The course will include PowerPoint slides and whole group and small group discussion.

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UNC NRP February 2024 Education Session: OSP Contracting Overview: A Deeper Dive

Please join the UNC Network for Research Professionals as Kimberly Austin and Laura Parker take us through a deeper dive into the Office of Sponsored Programs contracting process.

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Community and Neighborhood Level Interventions for Black Populations

The third discussion in the SSW's Black History Month series delves into effective, community-based mental health interventions. Hear from experts in the field, learn about culturally sensitive approaches to suicide prevention, and explore humanizing approaches to research with Black populations.

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Becoming A Data Detective – Holding AI Accountable

Bias and brittleness in artificial intelligence (Al) tools are a growing concern. Join Hilke Schellman, Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor and Journalism Professor at NYU, as she shares key takeaways from her book, The Algorithm: How Al Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now.

Al is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Algorithms are on the brink of dominating our lives and threaten our human future-if we don’t fight back. During the webinar, Schellmann will share takeaways about the rise of Al in the world of work and show how she tested many of the available tools herself without coding experience.

Learn more at datascienceconsortium.org.

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The Building Blocks to Well-Being: Connections Between Health and Stress

The Minority Health Conference, which is the largest and longest-running student-led health conference in the country, aims to raise awareness around minority health and mobilize students, academics and community members to take action for change. The conference seeks to examine the factors that have created and impacted health inequities across gender, race, economic status and other social determinants of health.

The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age, as well as the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life that impact health outcomes (Healthy People 2030).

One of the primary methods by which these factors influence health is through the mental and physical stress they can place on individuals and communities—with intergenerational life cycle impacts. This year's conference will explore the social determinants of health, the stress they can cause, and their impacts on the short and long-term well-being of minority communities.

IN-PERSON OR VIRTUAL OPTION FOR 2023 CONFERENCE:

• In-person will be held at the Friday Conference Center, 100 Friday Center Dr., Chapel Hill NC 27599
• The virtual link will be emailed to virtual attendees by mid-February.

*** REGISTRATION FOR THE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE HAS BEEN EXTENDED UNTIL FEBRUARY 19 FOR CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS ONLY.
THE IN-PERSON CONFERENCE HAS REACHED CAPACITY ***

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For more info, visit Minority Health Conference.

Description: This is a full-day, intensive, online interactive course focused on using the Dataverse Application Programming Interface (API) to interact with data archived in a Dataverse-based repository. The session will be broken into to two segments over the course of the day: 1) we will cover the basics of what an API is, how it works, and what it is used for, all set in terms of the Dataverse platform; and 2) will cover practical examples for programming with the Dataverse API using R, Python, and JavaScript (Node).

Participants will have the opportunity to work hands-on with writing simple code that they will be able to build on. The goal of the course is to give participants the basic tools needed to begin to automate self-deposit to a Dataverse data repository, but also for retrieving data for secondary analysis and other reuse.

NB: For one hour before the advertised start time, we will hold an open session for you to join us and get assistance with setting up your system, installing the software you need, etc. Details and software requirements will be sent by the instructor to registered participants one week before the course date.

Zoom link will be sent prior to the course. Registration must be made at least 3 days prior to the course date to receive the Zoom link.

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Virtual Vigilance: Monitoring of Decentralized Clinical Trials

This NIH Collaboratory Rethinking Clinical Trials Grand Rounds features:

Adrian Hernandez, MD
Executive Director, Duke Clinical Research Institute
Vice Dean, Duke University School of Medicine

Christopher J. Lindsell, PhD
Professor and co-Chief of Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics
Director, Data Science and Biostatistics, Duke Clinical Research Institute
Duke University School of Medicine
Editor in Chief, Journal of Clinical and Translational Science

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Carolina Engagement Week 2024 brings together Carolina faculty, staff and students with community partners to learn about and celebrate engagement and collaboration with North Carolina communities.

Register for the events you want to attend and participate in skill-building workshops, research presentations, panel discussions and more!

View the events at engagementweek.unc.edu/events-calendar.