Deck 43: Appendix

Question 1

Research in the population health sciences often seeks to answer questions about community health profiles, risk factors for disease, clinical effectiveness, and the impact of intervention.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

The critical questions to ask before committing to a particular research project are captured by the acronym PICOT.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

No one senior researcher, or even a team of research coaches, can provide all of the professional mentorship that a rising researcher requires.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

A technical editor who cleans up the grammar and spelling in a manuscript would be eligible for authorship of a research paper.

Question 5

When designing a research study, the first critical decision is whether to collect new data from individuals, use existing data, or write a review article.

Question 6

A cross-sectional study provides a snapshot of the health status of a population at one point in time.

Question 7

Because information is collected from individuals at multiple points in time, researchers can know with certainty which exposures were present in individual participants before onset of new disease.

Question 8

When the goal of the experiment is to test whether a new therapy is better than a current one, it is appropriate to compare the new therapy to a placebo.

Question 9

A quantitative study looks for the themes and measures that emerge from the observation of and interaction with key informants.

Question 10

The internal due dates set by the research team will need to be stringent and inflexible in order for the study to be analyzed and completed in a timely fashion.

Question 11

When a greater proportion of the total population is sampled for inclusion in the estimation of mean age, the confidence interval for the mean age will be wider because there is greater certainty about the sample mean being close to the population mean.

Question 12

The main limitation of closed-ended questions is that they may force respondents to select answers that do not truly express their status or opinions.

Question 13

Cronbach's alpha and the Kuder-Richardson Formula 21 are both measures of internal consistency among questionnaire items.

Question 14

Asking participants to complete their self-administered questionnaires at the same place and time can generate a lot of data quickly.

Question 15

Each interviewer should have the opportunity to participate in several mock interviews from start to finish, including the informed consent process.

Question 16

For experimental studies, which of the following is the group of individuals, communities, or organizations that will be examined?

A) Variables
B) Population
C) Control group
D) Participants

Question 17

Which acronym is especially helpful for addressing clinical research questions and designing intervention studies and serves as an alternative approach to framing a research question?

A) DAEMON
B) PICOT
C) SMART
D) MeSH

Question 18

A full reference for the document being reviewed, a brief summary of the article or report, and a note about the resource's potential relevance to the new study is the minimum to be included in which of the following?

A) Grant proposal
B) Abstract
C) Annotated bibliography
D) AMA citations

Question 19

Every research project has the possibility of contributing to advancing a field of research when it addresses which of the following?

A) New areas of research
B) Gaps in the literature
C) The presence of bias
D) Confounding of variables

Question 20

For what study approach will the research have great freedom in selecting study topics but may struggle to recruit adequate numbers of participants?

A) Primary study
B) Secondary study
C) Tertiary study
D) Cohort study

Question 21

For students, what is the first step in conducting scientific research?

A) Developing a focused research question
B) Identifying an area of original research
C) Identifying a professor or other experienced researcher to serve as a mentor
D) Find one or more senior colleagues who are willing to serve as formal or informal mentors

Question 22

According to criteria listed in ICMJE's Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, which of the following criteria must a researcher meet to earn coauthorship?

A) Conduct interviews for the project
B) Analyze blood samples of patients included in clinical trials
C) Draft the article and/or provide critical revisions of the intellectual content
D) Clean up grammar and spelling in a manuscript

Question 23

Which of the following is required to earn authorship of a research report?

A) Designing the study
B) Conducting the experiment
C) Analyzing the data
D) Writing the research report

Question 24

Under what circumstances would it be helpful to consider other factors during decision-making, including expected duration and cost of the study, the populations available for inclusion in the study, and the possible availability of existing data?

A) When an experimental design is chosen
B) When an observational design is chosen
C) When several different study designs are appropriate
D) When a systematic review or meta-analysis is the best approach

Question 25

If the goal of the study is to understand populations, to describe patterns, or to ask research questions that are not focused on causality, what is likely the only suitable study design?

A) Systematic review
B) Meta-analysis
C) Experimental design
D) Observational design

Question 26

When medical records will be consulted as part of the data collection process, it is often helpful to create which of the following that guides the extraction of information from medical records?

A) Posters
B) Questionnaires
C) Spreadsheets
D) Databases

Question 27

What type of study is used to study individual participants over a lengthy period of time?

A) Repeated cross-sectional study
B) KAP survey
C) Longitudinal study
D) Meta-analysis

Question 28

Which of the following is a row-by-column table that displays the counts of how often various combinations of events happen?

A) Contingency table
B) Two-by-two table
C) One-way table
D) Manifold table

Question 29

Which of the following are derived from the same tables used to calculate odds ratios?

A) Chi-square tests
B) Morbidity rates
C) Prevalence rates
D) Kappa statistics

Question 30

Which of the following is the first step for a prospective cohort study that will recruit participants based on exposure status?

A) Identify two accessible source populations
B) Select a source population
C) Identify a source of existing records that can provide baseline data of adequate quality
D) Identify an existing source of data

Question 31

What type of experimental study would aim to demonstrate the intervention is not worse than the control?

A) Superiority trial
B) Inferiority trial
C) Equivalence trial
D) Noninferiority trial

Question 32

Randomization eliminates what type of bias that may occur when people with different backgrounds, such as different exposure histories, are not equally distributed across treatment arms?

A) Assessment bias
B) Recall bias
C) Misclassification bias
D) Allocation bias

Question 33

Under which paradigm do researchers assume that reality is situational and it is acceptable to use any and all research tools and frameworks to try to understand a particular problem so it can be addressed?

A) Ontology
B) Constructivism
C) Pragmatism
D) Post-Positivism

Question 34

Which paradigm explains how a researcher knows what is real and true?

A) Ontology
B) Epistemology
C) Ethnography
D) Phenomenology

Question 35

Which of the following methods can sometimes be used to compare populations for which the population age distributions are known, but age-specific rates of exposure and/or disease are not known?

A) Direct age adjustment
B) Indirect age adjustment
C) Specific age adjustment
D) Nonspecific age adjustment

Question 36

A strong research protocol should be detailed enough that which of the following sections of any paper that will result from the project could be written before data collection begins?

A) Abstract
B) Methods
C) Results
D) Introduction

Question 37

The nested case-control study minimizes what type of bias because information about past exposures was collected at the time of the exposure and is not based on participants' memories?

A) Misclassification bias
B) Nonrandom sampling bias
C) Ascertainment bias
D) Recall bias

Question 38

The probability of a type 1 error is often noted by which Greek letter?

A) Alpha
B) Beta
C) Kappa
D) Omega

Question 39

Which of the following is present when content experts and users agree that a survey instrument will be easy for study participants to understand and correctly complete?

A) Content validity
B) Face validity
C) Construct validity
D) Criterion validity

Question 40

Before blood, urine, or other biological specimens are obtained, who is responsible for verifying that the potential risks to participants caused by the sample will be minimized?

A) Primary investigator
B) Institutional review board
C) Research ethics committee
D) Medical executive committee

Question 41

_________________________ examines a broad spectrum of biological, socioeconomic, environmental, and other factors that contribute to the presence or absence of physical, mental, and social health and well-being.

Question 42

One of the common approaches used to track the articles identified during a literature review is the creation of an ____________________________.

Question 43

A_______________________ describes a group of individuals with the same disease or who have undergone the same procedure.

Question 44

___________________ are essential for any outbreak investigation, no matter what study approach is used to investigate the epidemic.

Question 45

When the exposure histories for a pair are ____________________, they provide an indication about whether the exposure is likely to be risky or protective.

Question 46

_________________, sometimes called masking, occurs when participants in an experimental study and perhaps some research team members do not know whether a participant is in the active intervention group or the control group.

Question 47

Correlational studies that explore an environmental exposure, such as distance from the equator or level of air pollution, may be called ______________________.

Question 48

The incorrect attribution of population-level associations to individuals is called the _________________.

Question 49

The ________________________ is a well-defined subset of individuals from the target population.

Question 50

________________________ is the measurement of the human body. Measurements of this type are often important in health research, especially in studies of nutritional status.

Question 51

The websites of disease advocacy organizations, personal websites, and other media may be helpful in identifying and refining an important and meaningful study question.

Question 52

A study goal often includes the specific exposure, disease, and population that will be the focus of the study.

Question 53

An editor who raises important questions about the interpretation of the result and the meaning of the work should not earn authorship for a research paper.

Question 54

The obvious advantage of primary analyses is that a researcher may be able to move rather quickly from the definition of the study question to the analysis of related data.

Question 55

The study protocol should include the names of the people who have accepted responsibility for particular tasks, the dates they have agreed to work on those assignments, and the mechanisms that will be used to encourage careful and on-time completion of those items.

Question 56

Using the first minute of a phone call to explain why a particular study will make a difference in the world or to a particular community may increase the willingness of randomly dialed individuals to participate.

Question 57

Participants may have a right to the results of laboratory tests conducted on their own biological specimens, and the protocol should discuss how notification will occur.

Question 58

Bioinformatics typically focuses on analysis of patient or population level data.

Question 59

Narrative reviews are becoming less common as editors and reviewers push for the use of systematic methods.

Question 60

Exemption from review may be granted when the research involves the analysis of existing data, documents, or records or stored biological specimens that cannot be linked to individuals.

Question 61

A grant usually requires that a particular deliverable, such as a commissioned report, be submitted to the funding agency by the end of the contract period.

Question 62

For closed-ended questions and quantitative surveys, a codebook is even more essential because it provides clear instructions for how to code and enter free-response comments.

Question 63

Parametric tests make more assumptions about the variables being examined than nonparametric tests.

Question 64

The results of regression models can be used as part of qualitative considerations of causality derived from the Bradford Hill criteria and other more recent adaptations.

Question 65

Stochastic models mean that the outcomes of the model will be the same every time the model is run with the same inputs.

Question 66

Using circles and arrows to visibly group related topics to clarify connections, then considering which of those broad areas might be worth exploring is a process known as which of the following?

A) Brainstorming
B) Snowballing
C) Concept mapping
D) Flow charting

Question 67

For early career professionals, what is the first step in conducting scientific research?

A) Developing a focused research question
B) Identifying an area of original research
C) Identifying a professor or other experienced researcher to serve as a mentor
D) Finding one or more senior colleagues who are willing to serve as formal or informal mentors

Question 68

Which of the following can be part of the case definition but is rarely sufficient to cover all inclusion and exclusion criteria on its own?

A) ICD code
B) Disease description
C) Relevant person, place, and time characteristics
D) Records from clinical locations

Question 69

The most common way to report results for a cross-sectional survey is simply to report which of the following?

A) Incidence rate
B) Prevalence rate
C) Morbidity rate
D) Mortality rate

Question 70

What type of cohort study establishes baseline information from birth records, school records, medical files, occupational records, or other sources that may be decades old?

A) Prospective cohort study
B) Retrospective cohort study
C) Longitudinal cohort study
D) Generational cohort study

Question 71

In which paradigm do researchers aim to experimentally test theories about how the world works, but they acknowledge that the unpredictability of human behavior limits the validity of some empirical methods?

A) Post-positivism
B) Critical theory
C) Constructivism
D) Pragmatism

Question 72

Most exposures and outcomes used in correlational studies are in the form of which of the following?

A) Personal-level data
B) Population-level data
C) Regional-level data
D) Global-level data

Question 73

Research studies, including members of which population, require extra consideration of the potential risks of research to participants?

A) Convenience population
B) Vulnerable population
C) Source population
D) Target population

Question 74

The probability of a type 2 error is often referred to by using which Greek letter?

A) Alpha
B) Beta
C) Kappa
D) Omega

Question 75

Which of the following is appraised when the new test is correlated with subsequent measures of performance in related domains?

A) Discriminant validity
B) Criterion validity
C) Concurrent validity
D) Predictive validity

Question 76

Regardless of the data source, if the researcher conducting the statistical analysis has not had any contact with the individuals whose data is being examined, what type of analysis does this have to be?

A) Primary analysis
B) Secondary analysis
C) Tertiary analysis
D) Quaternary analysis

Question 77

Which of the following might summarize important clinical aspects of a disease or summarize the epidemiological profile for a well-defined population?

A) Narrative review
B) Systematic review
C) Meta-analysis
D) Mixed-methods analysis

Question 78

Beneficence is often paired with which other ethical principle that means the study should do no harm?

A) Autonomy
B) Justice
C) Nonmaleficence
D) Respect

Question 79

The application for what type of analysis must include evidence that the data are in the public domain or that appropriate individuals or organizations have granted the researcher permission to analyze the data?

A) Primary analysis
B) Secondary analysis
C) Meta-analysis
D) Mixed methods analysis

Question 80

Which of the following refers to the entire process of record keeping, whether tracking articles considered for eligibility in a systematic review, extracting data from patient charts for a case series, logging the responses to a cross-sectional or case-control survey, or recording all the results of clinical assessment conducted during a longitudinal cohort or experimental study?

A) Data management
B) Data cleaning
C) Data recoding
D) Data entry