The Story of Research

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The Story of Research

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Before anything else

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Where this goes

The whole map is on the table in the first ten minutes. Phase I gives the vocabulary. Phase II teaches you to read and design. Phase III lets you analyze. Phase IV is literacy. Nothing in Phase III arrives before the language for it exists.

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The exit competency

This is the public promise. By Session 30 you can be handed an unfamiliar medical paper, in a field that is not yours, and say what it asked, whether the design could answer it, what the numbers mean, where it is vulnerable, and whether you believe it.

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Notice What Is Missing

If you leave able to calculate something, the wrong class was taught. Session 1 is about how a doctor comes to believe something, how a paper is built, and where statistics actually enters. The algebra waits.

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Act I · Why Does Research Exist at All?

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A question for a doctor with ten years behind him

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Three ways of believing

Authority fails when it is only repeating a teacher. Experience fails because you never meet the patient you did not treat. Evidence is the third kind of knowing, done deliberately enough to be checked. Research is not a different kind of knowing. It is that third one.

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Act II · The Anatomy of a Paper

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The paper we live inside

The first paper is a real trial, not a toy example. COBRA-BPS is taken apart the same afternoon the course begins, so every later session can point back at a study the room already knows.

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Every paper has the same skeleton

Title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, references. Once the skeleton is named, reading stops being a hunt through prose and becomes a walk through rooms that always appear in the same order.

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The title has already told you the design

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Reading an abstract in five moves

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The same five moves have a name: PICO

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Where the numbers actually live

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What they found

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One sentence, in slow motion

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Why the interval matters more than the verdict

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The same result, in a different currency

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Is 5.2 mm Hg worth it?

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Five questions, every paper, forever

What was asked, of whom, how, what was found, and whether you believe it. These five survive the whole program. Later sessions add tools. They do not replace this list.

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Act III · So Where Does Statistics Actually Enter?

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It was there the whole time

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The one distinction this session exists to teach

Description is a statement about the people you measured. Inference is a statement about the people you did not. Every number in a paper belongs in one of those two boxes. Session 1 ends when that sort can be done out loud.

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The arrow that points backwards

You measured a sample. You want a sentence about a population. The arrow points the wrong way for comfort, which is why statistics exists at all. The next session names who the population is and what one row of the data actually is.

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Why we can never simply be certain

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Two ways to be wrong, in a table you already know

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The mean is the same. The patients are not.

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What statistics cannot fix

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Not all evidence weighs the same

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Act IV · Your Turn

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Where research questions actually come from

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Now write one of your own

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What a clinical research career abroad actually asks for

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Before the next session

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Where we started