Methodology Clinics

• To train our students. One potential outcome, if the clinics are successful, is a graduate course in Methodological Consulting.
• To develop alternative funding streams for graduate student support.
• To identify potential employment opportunities for students and graduates.
• To facilitate collaborations between our faculty and our colleagues.

• Clarifying your research question (i.e. put in an answerable form)
  • Primary and secondary objectives
  • Testable hypotheses
• Advising on appropriate research design and terminology
• Assisting with critical evaluation of measures and instruments
  • Validity/reliability of primary outcome, secondary outcome(s), covariates
• Assisting with original scale creation and evaluation
• Advising on proper statistical analysis
  • Conducting analyses and interpreting results
• Assisting with sample size/power calculations
• Grantsmanship: helping you align your research questions/objectives/hypotheses, your measures, and your analysis sections
• Manuscript preparation and responses to reviewers

Clinics are by appointment, only, and occur on Fridays 2:30-3:30 p.m. via Zoom. Please email brief description of request to epibio@uwo.ca, to schedule your appointment.

Consulting is usually done at one or two meetings. Simple sample size calculations and proper design terminology are examples. The drop-in sessions are designed for this.

Collaboration is a longer-term relationship in which the methodologists are considered members of the scientific team.

• The initial consultation at the drop-in session is provided at no cost.
  • We will provide you with an ‘in-kind’ cost for our services.
• Subsequent activities may be billed (at fair market rates). This will be negotiated depending on the complexity and amount of work required.
• Faculty members are expected to maintain their own independent research programs. You may be asked to consider offering co-investigator status and co-authorships to faculty and students depending on their involvement and a potential match with the faculty member’s program of research.

• Requests at the last minute before grant deadlines
• Arriving with data in unanalyzable form
  • Excel spreadsheets are acceptable
    • Conventionally, variables are in columns and individuals are in rows
  • Avoid words (e.g. ‘male’, ‘female’), use numbers instead (0,1) for the values.
    • Create a codebook so everyone knows what each value and each variable means.
    • Minimize missing data, and provide a code (e.g. 99) to differentiate missing values from actual values
• Collapsing your data prematurely.
  • If you assign cut-points to continuous data to create categories (e.g. ‘mild’, ‘moderate’, ‘severe’), keep the original data in an adjacent column.
• Providing data with any patient identifiers (names, addresses, OHIP numbers)
  • In column 1, assign each individual a numeric Study ID that only you have the master list for.
• We can help you respond to reviewers’ comments if we were involved in the original analysis plan on the grant or paper. Forensic re-analyses of something we are seeing for the first time is usually very difficult and sometimes impossible.