Back to MEANS Homepage Mick has had two placement students from university sandwich
courses - one from Sheffield Hallam and one from the University
of Huddersfield. Most of their work was on data entry and coding.
They carried out some interview based data collection, helped
design questionnaires, wrote reports and did some data analysis.
The most technical statistics was some c2 tests.
Mick is in Health Service Research - mostly sample surveys -so
is very much into questionnaire design in specific contexts. e.g.
there was a large life style survey analysed, mostly cross
tabulations and regression, some t-tests. Another example was an
analysis of a questionnaire for Health Promotion. The students
had to explain the results to others; they also needed to be
taught SPSS and went on some grass roots training. Positively
they brought to the unit a broader knowledge of statistical
packages.
I asked Mick about his own background education and training
for he work he has to do. His background was not at all
mathematical - he came through a social sciences first degree
followed by an MSc in Social Research Methods, and does not have
A-level mathematics. He finds he tends to need advice when trying
to assess the mathematical background to his work (he does not
have to do this very often). He learned about questionnaire
design and much of his practical statistics on his Masters degree.
They found that they needed to train people in getting data
for Health Research and have produced a 2-day training course. He
gave me a copy of the manual. They had people from many
backgrounds with 40 to 50 people (including nurses, GP's,
consultants). 2 days was too short for what they wanted to do.
They have an open door policy for research advice and put on the
course because they were always being asked the same questions,
people were coming with poor data and needed training in research
and audit. They also do quite a lot of interview based research.
The sort of skills he wanted the students to have if they were
to work with him were: skills in using statistics with other
people; consultancy skills; plain English report writing; turning
results into policy; assessing the strength of an argument. Mick
had found one of the most useful parts of his (Masters) course
was where they had had to present their results to their peers.
Large classes could be split into subgroups. Amongst people on
his undergraduate course he was disturbed by the lack of
intellectual curiosity and the fact that the teaching made the
statistical methods seem so dull. He had no substantial comments
to make on the assessment of his course which was a mixture lf
examinations and continuous assessment.
Peter Holmes
14/10/96