The UCL Health and Society summer school: Social Determinants of Health will be held from Monday 4th July 2022 - Friday 8th July 2022.

The summer school is organised by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. It provides an in-depth assessment of the social determinants of health from a global research, policy and governance perspective. Participants will have numerous opportunities for discussion over the one week course.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot will open the summer school with a presentation on the social determinants of health and close the week with a discussion on national and international policy development. 

Lecturers

Ellie Iob, Eduardo Fe, and Bianca De Stavola

Course description

This introductory course is for anyone wishing to understand how causal questions can be investigated using real world data (RWD), that is data on the everyday experiences of individuals that are collected through surveys, cohort studies, administrative and clinical databases or accrued for reasons other than research.  These data are observational, as opposed to experimental. Because of this, using them to address causal questions raises many concerns and difficulties. In this course we will describe the main sources of bias affecting RWD and possible strategies to deal with them.

The course will start by distinguishing between different types of studies (e.g., RCTs, cross-sectional and longitudinal) and data sources (e.g., research-based, administrative databases).  It will then describe the sources of bias that are likely to affect observational data, in particular those arising from the non-randomized allocation of exposures (denoted confounding bias in epidemiology and selection bias in the social sciences), from missing participation (including missing data), and from measurement errors. We will then introduce two main design-based approaches to attempt dealing with (some of) these biases: the framework of target trial emulation and the exploitation of natural experiments.

For timetable details please see the "More Information Tab"

Please note that Students are not eligible to apply, this training is for non-students only.