Next course delivery: September to December 2025
> Your Data: Do you know its value to the health and well-being of society?
Course description
This course examines the basics of what administrative data are:
- Where they come from
- How they can be used for research
- What the data produced for research projects look like
- The skills needed to work with them
- Basic statistical analysis of these data
This course also provides an overview of ethics and privacy issues related to research uses of administrative data.
Learning objectives
- Articulate privacy issues and protections as they relate to the analysis of administrative health data for research purposes.
- Articulate a clear and "research-ready" research question appropriate to administrative health data.
- Create a data dictionary.
- Create an analytic data set—with one record per person—from administrative data.
- Navigate within and use Population Data BC's Secure Research Environment.
- Use SAS statistical software both for data management and for (relatively simple) data analysis.
- Write methodology that supports reproducibility of the analyses undertaken.
- Present findings showing policy relevance of your research.
Prerequisites
- Admission to the Professional Specialization Certificate (PSC) in Population Health Data Analysis or permission of the Faculty Advisor
- SAS statistical software will be introduced in this course. For pre-reading resources contact Melissa Payne, PHDA Program Assistant, UVic Continuing Studies at: bstassist@uvic.ca
This course is eligible for the StrongerBC future skills grant. To register using this grant please first review your eligibility.
Instructor: Alvin Li
Alvin Li is currently a clinical epidemiologist for a real-world health data intelligence company. Prior to this role, he was a scientist at a provincial health organization focusing on applied research for cancer prevention. He has over 10 years of research experience and has conducted multiple projects using large health administrative datasets on various topics including kidney transplantation, immigrant health and the evaluation of health policies.
He completed his PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics at Western University and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ottawa Health Research Institute. He has a strong interest in teaching and has also taught lessons on data analytics.
This program has been developed by Population Data BC in partnership with the Division of Continuing Studies, University of Victoria.
For further details, visit the Division of Continuing Studies webpage.
