Biostatistics

The primary purpose of Catalyst assistance program is to assist investigators in writing grants and not so much to assist with data analysis. The scope of the assistance needs to be restricted so that it takes hours rather than days to complete. The best way to do this is as follows.

1. Organize the data so that it is easy to analyze. See the guidelines.

2. Make sure the data is correct. Do tabulations and range checks on the data and make sure that the data set brought in is the final one. Make all decisions before you come about how each variable is to be coded and interpreted.

3. Create summary tables (of rates and mean/medians) for all variables that will be needed in analyses. It will help in cleaning the data and exploring questions.

4. Limit our help to a single analysis that you need help doing on a limited number of variables. Have a clearly specified hypothesis or analysis plan.