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BHI Research Methods MEBI 537, Fall, '07 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Assignment Calendar:
I will draw material from three textbooks for this course:
I would like students to purchase the Shadish textbook; for the other readings, I will photocopy the selected chapters and make them available to students. All other reading assignments from the primary literature can be retrieved from the course Eres pages. (Please note: there are more readings on this site than those that are actually assigned here!) General expectations: There are three categories of assignments in this class: (a) reading assignments, (b) written essays, and (c) the final project. See the final project page for information on this assignment. To help with my goal (b), you can expect that I will grade homeworks promptly (within about a week) and be available should you want to discuss them. Reading assignments: In addition to (obviously) reading these prior to class, I also expect you to be able to discuss them in class. In some cases, this may require multiple readings; it certainly means that you must think about what you read, and perhaps taking some notes to help you offer discussion points and ideas during class. (As specified in the grading page, class participation is 15% of your final grade.) Reading assignments are either from textbooks, where an aspect of research methods is presented in a didactic manner, or readings from the primary literature. For the latter sort of reading, the idea is that the papers are cases or examples of different sorts of research methodologies. Thus, you should focus on these methodological aspects of the readings. Written (essay) assignments: First, please read my web page on a "reaction essay", as designed for the KR course (MEBI 550) that I taught in Winter '05. Although the essays for BHI Research Methods are not all "reaction essays", this description should give you a view of my perspective on writing skills and the value of a short, well-constructed essay. All of the essays for this course have the same page limit: 2 pages, 12 pt font. All of the essays are also somewhat open-ended. My approximate grading rubric for these essays is as follows:
In addition to helping you think and learn about research methods, an important secondary goal of these assignments is to be able to write clearly and convincingly. So that you can learn about my expectations and improve over the course of the quarter, you can expect that I will grade homeworks promptly (within a week) and be available should you want to discuss them. Using the three assigned papers, either defend or reject the idea that all three describe research that is appropriately part of the single scientific field of "biomedical & health informatics". Given your 2-page limit, you should not summarize each of the articles, but instead focus on particular aspects of the papers that support your argument. The article by Bunescu et al (AI in Medicine, 2005; Mooney is the "corresponding" and senior author) is a good example of a systems evaluation paper. It is a formal, careful comparative study, yet has no driving hypothesis to be proven (no causal connection to be established), nor does it evaluate system use in the "real world" (it is a laboratory-only evaluation). Use this work as a springboard for some imaginative work: Write a piece of fiction that describes more about an installation and application of some of the technologies that Bunescu et al. describe. You may either describe an observational study of the use of a fictional installation of this technology, or describe a hypothesis-testing study that investigates some effect of the technology. You should describe your experimental methods and results. A required component of this assignment is that your fictional work must make appropriate reference to the Bunescu paper. I'd like you to make your reference as detailed as possible -- you must choose which of the AI methodologies your installation uses, and refer to the characteristics of that method that Bunescu et al describe. Of course, as fiction, you can also cite other fictional "background work", if the Bunescu results are not quite sufficient for the implementation you have in mind. Thus, I am asking you to demostrate how exporatory, systems evaluation research can be built upon and used in more mature, hypothesis driven or real-world evaluation research. How to we decide if qualitative work is good or useful? In 1998, Poses & Isis published a rather inflammatory "perspective paper" about the use of qualitative research and its relevance & significance to practitioners of health care. [The '98 issue of J Gen Int Med also includes an explicit rebuttal by various authors. Although fun to read, I didn't find it as useful. It's also on the eres pages; consider it an optional reading assignment] Imho, one of the best rebuttals can be found in JAMA, in a pair of articles by Giacomini & Cook (2000). I've assigned the first of these articles that focuses on the quality of qualitative work. Given these two articles, take a stand on the issue: How do these authors' arguments apply to BHI research? My strong preference is that you not simply say "BHI needs to have both qualitative and quantitative research", but instead argue in favor of one approach or the other. One teaching goal for this assignment is to help you realize that although one can do good research in either tradition, in some ways the two world views are indeed in conflict with one another. You certainly need not be as dogmatic as Poses & Isis, but I want you to emphasize and argue for the strengths of one of these approaches over the other. For this essay, I'll simply ask for a regular, open-ended "reaction essay" on the Mohr paper, with the explicit request that you focus on the methodology used, and (of course) the relationship between that methodology, the research question, and the reported results. By now, you should have read enough and thought about methods enough to have lots of good ways to organize your essay. For example, you could compare this work to the validity framework of Shadish. You could also react to the notion of research that uses a hypothesis driven experimentation methodology (since this is the first of these we've read so far), in contrast to qualitative or evaluative methodological frameworks.
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Last Updated: |
Contact the instructor at: gennari@u.washington.edu
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