Odum Institute: Introduction to Integrated Data Analysis

This 2.5 hour course will be offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

This short course will be a basic introduction to integrative data analysis, the simultaneous analysis of pooled individual-level data. Participants will gain familiarity with the underlying concepts and tools that are central to this approach, which is increasingly used in various fields including public health, behavioral medicine, epidemiology, and clinical trials. The course will include an overview of approaches to harmonizing measurement instruments, common challenges, and potential techniques to address them to improve cross-study comparisons and generalizability. We will cover an example application of integrative data analysis to an ongoing study combining 18 randomized prevention trials. Finally, we will also present some of the limitations of integrative data analyses as well as potential directions for future work.

Instructor: Alberto Valido
Alberto Valido obtained a BS degree in Psychology from the University of Florida and is currently a fourth year PhD student in Applied Developmental Science at the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Alberto’s research is focused on the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ youth of color and protective factors that can buffer against the adverse effects of discrimination and bias-based victimization. His research examines the role of societal-level factors such as systemic inequality, racism, hetero-sexism, and cis-sexism and ways to combine individual, state- and policy-level data using integrative data analysis. As a project coordinator since 2017, Alberto has mentored over 30 research assistants and has coordinated operations for multiple federal grants, including a CDC-funded randomized clinical trial of a suicide prevention program; an NIJ-funded project to develop and pilot test a tip reporting app, and an NSF-funded project to detect cyber-bullying in YouTube comments. Alberto has also collaborated on several meta-analyses and literature reviews, including a literature review of protective factors of homophobic bullying, a meta-analysis of risk and protective factors of suicidality among sexual and gender minority youth, a meta-analysis on school violence, and a meta-analysis of cyber-bullying prevention programs. Alberto successfully obtained a diversity supplement from NIMH (Grant no. 3R01MH117598-02S1) and more recently an F31 NIMH Diversity Fellowship to apply a developmental approach to the study of mental health outcomes among LGBTQ youth of color using integrative data analysis. To date, he has published 53 peer-reviewed articles, 13 book chapters and 31 conference presentations.

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