Course Project: "OPIOID ADDICTION IN TEENS" Scholar-Practitioner Project Final Assignment (15 pages, excluding references)

The following is an example of a content outline for this paper. While you are not required to follow this outline exactly, all of the following content should be included in some way in the scholarly paper:

· Title page

· Background (one page maximum)

· Statistics and information about the health outcome/disease(s)

· Statistics and information about the exposure/risk factor(s)

· Brief discussion of possible connection between exposure(s) and outcome(s) and justification for the study

· Research questions and hypotheses

· State the study’s research questions along with their associated hypotheses

· Target population and sample size

· Description of target population and sample

· Inclusion and exclusion criteria

· The sampling strategy to be used

Sample size considerations (how large of a sample do you need and why)

· Recruitment (primary data collection) or data selection (secondary data) strategies

· If collecting your own data, describe:

· How you will find and contact potential participants (where, when, with what method)

· The type of data collection method to be used (e.g., online survey)

· How many times participants will be contacted and by what method

· If using secondary data (an existing database), describe:

· The procedures used for recruitment, participation, and data collection by the owners of the database (i.e., how were the data in the database collected?)

· How you will gain access to the dataset

·

· Instrumentation (data collection tools such as surveys, interviews, or medical record abstraction forms)

· For each published instrument you plan to use:

· Identify the name of the instrument, its author, and its year of publication

· Describe the instrument and what it measures

· Discuss why the instrument is appropriate for your study and your population

· Provide information about where and with whom the instrument has been used previously

· Include information on the instruments’ known validity/reliability

·

· For each instrument you plan to create yourself:

· Describe the instrument and what it measures

· Discuss your plans for testing validity and reliability

· Provide information about how your instrument will help answer your research questions

· Operationalization of Variables (exposures, outcomes, covariates, potential confounders)

·

· For each variable in your study describe:

· Its definition specific to your study

· How it will be measured in your study

· How the variable will be coded (e.g., if collecting information on age will it be collected continuously (individual age in years) or in categories (age 18-24, 25-34, etc.)?)

· For each scale in your study, describe:

· Its definition specific to your study

· How the scale score is calculated and interpreted

· Statistical analysis plans

· Describe data cleaning and screening procedures for the initial dataset

· Discuss your plans for initial descriptive analyses and any other preliminary statistics that may be appropriate (e.g., bivariate analyses to assess potential confounders, collinearity analyses)

· For each research question/hypothesis:

· Identify the statistical test that will be used to test the association

· Describe which variables will be included in the analysis and why

· Identify the measures of association, parameter estimates, or other results and describe how they will be interpreted

· Include a discussion of additional procedures as appropriate (e.g., Bonferroni corrections, goodness-of-fit tests, tests for interaction)

· Strengths and Limitations

· Discussion of the strengths of your study proposal (e.g., strengths of study design, instrumentation, analysis)

· Selection biases

· Description of potential selection bias concerns (i.e., how representative your sample will be of the larger population)

· Discussion of strategies you will use to minimize selection bias in your study

· Information biases

· Description of the potential information biases in your study

· Discussion of how information bias will be handled or minimized in the study

· Confounding

· Identify possible confounders of the associations in your research questions

· Discuss strategies that you will use to minimize and/or measure confounding in your study

· Identification of any statistical limitations (e.g., power)

· Social Change Implications

· Identify how the study results might advance knowledge in epidemiology

· Identify how the study results might advance public health practice

· Describe potential implications for positive social change (who might be affected and how)

· Ethical Considerations (describe how you will protect human participants and their information)

· If you are collecting your own data:

· Discuss plans for administering informed consent

· Identify any ethical concerns related to recruitment or data collection and your plans to address those concerns

·

· For all studies:

· Describe any institutional approvals needed

· Describe whether data will be identifiable, anonymous, and/or confidential and the protections you will take (data storage procedures, who will have access to the data, etc.)

· Any other ethical issues and how they will be addressed (e.g., conducting a study at your workplace)

· References