Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPM843) or permission of the instructor. Through this course, doctoral students and advanced masters students will learn how to use quantitative data to answer questions of interest in health services research. Students will learn to distinguish between descriptive, predictive, and causal research questions and how data are used to answer these different types of questions. Rather than presenting a laundry list of specific techniques to memorize, the course will build intuition and facility with foundational concepts that unify different methods. We will cover several different approaches to causal inference, emphasizing the link between study design, analysis approach, and the assumptions required for causal interpretation. Students completing this course will be able to implement regression-based analyses in their own future work; to take higher level courses; and to read quantitative literature with a critical eye. The course will integrate in-class lectures and computer labs with at-home problem sets featuring analysis of real-world data.

Note that this information may change at any time. Please visit the MyBU Student Portal for the most up-to-date course information.