DCR Students –
As noted in my news post from earlier today, our 9am in-person lecture on Tuesday next week has been cancelled. Our planned lecturer, Deborah Grady, informed me that she has had a last-minute conflict and cannot make it.
Luckily, we have a high-quality recording of her lecture. Please watch this prior to class on Tuesday. As Warren said in his lecture earlier this week, confounding is one of the most challenging topics in clinical research, and it’s really important that you start grappling with the ideas and thinking about how they might impact your study. Deborah’s lecture slides (a slightly different version from the one that she goes through in the recording) are also posted.
Instead of an in-person lecture, I will host a casual drop-in session, in our usual lecture hall, to discuss questions about the concepts from the week, individual student projects, or anything else you would like – we’ll play it by ear depending on who shows up. You are also welcome to simply skip and go straight to your small group session at 10am.
Your assignment this week will be to think through how to enhance causal inference in your study (assuming that is what you are interested in). You’ll do a different sort of write up depending on your study design – see details in Assignment 5. The Assignment 5 Example actually provides 2 write-ups – one for a case-control study, and one for an RCT – to help you understand what kinds of discussion we’re looking for. This week’s reading is also important and high-quality, as always!
It is also time to get serious about putting together your Final Project – a 5-Page Protocol describing your study. Please see instructions and templates at the end of the syllabus (Monday Sept 17th). I recommend putting together a formal and nicely formatted draft of the protocol this week – you’ll still be filling in some of the sections in the coming weeks, but you’ll start getting a sense of what “holes” you still have and where you’ll need to spend extra efforts before the end of the course to fill these in and have a complete plan for your study. The sooner you do this, the more chances you’ll have to get help from our DCR Faculty (starting with your Small Group Leader).
Hope to see some of you between 9a-10a on Tuesday morning for the drop-in discussion time.