Høst 2023

HEL-3006 Introduction to Epidemiology and Biostatistics - 10 stp

The course is administrated by

Institutt for samfunnsmedisin

Type of course

This course is mandatory for students at the Master's degree programme in Public Health. Course students may be admitted if the total number of students do not exceed the maximum number of 30.

Course contents

The course covers the basic principles and methods of epidemiology including measures of disease occurrence and disease risk in populations and various research designs for investigating the etiology of disease. Introduction to critical review of scientific papers is also included. A fundamental part of this course is biostatistics, where the students will be introduced to hypothesis testing and confidence intervals as well as commonly used methods in quantitative data analysis. The statistical software SPSS is also used.

Objective of the course

Objectives of the course

Knowledge The students should be able to define central principles in epidemiology, including important concepts in demography, and be able to explain the benefits and drawbacks of various epidemiological study designs. The students should further be able to explain basic statistical concepts.

Skills and competences The students should be able to:

apply central concepts in epidemiology and demography
classify the study design used in scientific medical papers
explain sources of bias in epidemiological studies
select the correct type of epidemiological and statistical data analyses for a given data set
use descriptive measures, one- and two-sample tests (t-tests, chi-square tests and non-parametric tests), correlation and linear regression
use SPSS for data editing and statistical analyses
interpret the results from the statistical and epidemiological analyses, showing a basic understanding of relative and absolute risks, p-values and confidence intervals

Language of instruction

English

Teaching methods

There will be three gatherings lasting 4-5 days each. The course includes lectures, exercises and group work. Attendance to lectures and seminars is mandatory. The online learning management system Canvas is an important tool in this course.