Hello and welcome back to this global health you tube channel.
My name is Greg Martin. We're going to do a few videos that look at study design
and research methods. Now we are going to look at epidemiological
research, we're going to look at the social sciences like anthropology and
essentially we're going to try to unpack how it is that these different kinds of
research fit together to provide us with the science and understanding the industry
to make clinical and public health decisions.
Now typically, people tend to think of research methods in terms of qualitative
research and quantitative research. These two distinct disciplines or two
distinct types of research methods and the qualitative research is the domain
of the social scientists and anthropologists and the quantitative
research is the domain of the epidemiologists and
economist and what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about is the fact that
these two groups of people actually use both sets of research methods.
So let's just jump right in and try to understand
these different research techniques and research methods. Qualitative research tends to answer questions like
who, what, why, when, and how. It tries to unpack and understand the nature of a
phenomenon or the qualities associated with a particular phenomenon.
By contrast quantitative research
answer the question of how much. It considers the idea of magnitude.
So when we talk about magnitude that 'how much' the quantitative research we're
talking about how much of firstly an occurrence,
so the incidence or prevalence of the disease in the community ,
and we're talking about the magnitude or how much of a relationship. So the Association for
example between a risk factor and an outcome.
I'm just going to quickly give you an overview of some of the research
methods used in these two groups of methods: qualitative research, and
quantitative research. In qualitative research we may do a simple observation
of what's happening in a community or you
might be looking down a microscope for example, that is qualitative research. We may do in-depth
interviews or key informant interviews. We may do focus groups and and speak
to a group of people. We may do surveys. All of this is to try and unpack and
understand the underlying nature or qualities within a phenomenon.
The other group the quantitative research now we've got interventional
quantitative research and we've got non-interventional.
By non-interventional we mean it's observational where we're watching
to see what happens in the world and we're counting something up.
So in that sense we might be doing case-control studies and we'll talk more
about that in a future video. We may be doing cohort studies and I'm
specifically going to talk in a future video
about the difference between those two and their relative strengths and weaknesses. We may do an ecological study
and we may of course also be doing a survey and just clicking (unintelligable)
then of course there's the interventional trials and the
one we talk about most are randomized control trials or
double-blind randomized control trials and we're going to do an entire video
that looks specifically at them.
Okay, thanks for listening I hope that was helpful this was just a synopsis, an
overview of the various research methods that we use. In future videos
we're going to dig down a little deeper and look at some of the
details of these different study designs and research methods that gets used.
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Thanks for watching, I'll be back!