2012 Statistics Canada Health Canada Workshop

The general aim of the 3-day workshop was to familiarize participants with analytical capabilities required for working with microdata files of Statistics Canada’s Health Division.

February 21 (Medical Sciences Building room 148) - The presentations and discussions covered the objectives, methodology, questionnaire content, and dissemination plans of the following: 

  • The Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS)
  • National Population Health Survey (NPHS)
  • Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS)
  • Health Indicators Program

February 22 (Kresge Building Room K7) – The hands-on workshop provided an overview of the various considerations to be taken into account when using the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) data. It also provided participants an understanding of the bootstrap method of variance estimation using Bootvar.

February 23 (Kresge Building Room K7) - Using data gathered through NPHS, the hands-on workshop familiarized participants with different longitudinal data analysis methods to better address research questions on change and event occurrence. The workshop emphasized the importance of taking into account the survey design when analyzing data.

The workshop materials included slide presentations and worksheets. The workshop was “green” in that much of the materials were sent to participants in electronic version prior to the workshop. All the participants brought in their laptops to the workshop.

The work stations in the workshop venue (Room K7 at the Kresge Building) have SAS 9.1, the statistical package that was used for the training.  A CD containing the synthetic longitudinal data file of the National Population Health Survey was provided to each participant.  The data file was used by the instructors to illustrate the various statistical methods, and by the participants to practice on the techniques. 

Instructors and Participants

Abdelnasser Saïdi

Senior Methodologist
Methods for Justice, Health Analysis and Health Measures
Household Survey Methods Division
Statistics Canada

He obtained his PhD in Statistics from the University of Grenoble (France) and was a professor of statistics at the University of Algiers and at Université de Montréal. His main research areas of interest are analytic inference from complex survey data and analysis of data linked by probabilistic methods.

Rose Evra

Methodologist  
National Population Health Survey, Household Survey Methods Division
Statistics Canada

She has worked for the Unified Enterprise Survey that gathered business data. She obtained her Mathematics degree at Université de Montréal.

Participants

Participation in the first day of the workshop was open to everyone.  For the second and third day, the number of participants was limited by the number of workstations in the workshop venue.

On the first day, 35 people participated, many coming from Western’s various faculties and departments including Biostatistics, Health Sciences, Statistical Science, Social Psychology, Sociology, and Health Economics. Thirteen students participated in the full 3-day workshop, and five others participated in the 2nd and 3rd days only.  Of these eighteen students, 13 were masters, 4 doctoral, and 1 post-doctoral student.

Participant Evaluation

The workshop proceeded smoothly as planned, with both the participants and instructors appreciative of the event. These can be gleaned from the informal conversations with the participants and from the responses to the evaluation questionnaire. 

Comments made by the participants in the questionnaire are interesting and useful, as can be seen from some excerpts:

  • This workshop provided an excellent opportunity to know more about Statistics Canada data, how to access these data, and what methodologies to use in analyzing the data. While the focus was on heatlh data, much of the content of the workshop is applicable to other substantive areas.
  • I found the instructors to be really helpful and informative, and the workshop overall was done well. Unfortunately, I was not familiar with the stats program SAS … a VERY brief overview of basic SAS operations may have been useful to non-SAS users. Regardless of this, I still got a lot out of the workshop, and am glad I was able to attend.
  • Overall, it is a wonderful workshop. The two presenters are very knowledgeable.
  • The Workshop was very informative and well organized. Going through 3 days will provide any participant with the skill and knowledge to use any dataset from the CCHS.
Western provides the best student experience among Canada's leading research-intensive universities.