Guide to Masters research in the Department of OE Medicine
Step 1: Before you get Started
Before you get started with your research, you need to apply to the University to commence your studies. You need to complete the applications forms online. To apply, you need to visit the UKZN Application Site and complete the current university application form. In addition, you need to complete this concept document with your application.
Once the above procedures are complete, you will be contacted by our Discipline Administator, Mr, Sibongiseni Ngema (Ngemas1@ukzn.ac.za) once your application has been reviewed within the Discipline. Your application will be reviewed based on certain critical criteria, including your ability to complete a postgraduate qualification. Your marks in your undergraduate programmes are important, particularly in courses such as epidemiology and biostatistics, your ability to write in English, computer skills and technical competency in research area (for example, you cannot do a genetics study, if you have not had training in laboratory sciences). Another important criteria is your areas of research interest. As a policy, we only supervise in areas of our research expertise and interest. Should you wish to consider other areas, we may re-direct you to another Discipline or institution depending on the study area.
You will be invited for an interview at which the Head of Discipline and another academic , potentially your supervisor, if you are accepted, will be present. A general discussion to assess your ability, your capacity to undertake a research programme, resources at your disposal, gaps in your knowledge etc wil be addressed.
Once we have agreed that you are ready to be accepted into a Masters programme, your concept document, application form signed off by your supervisor, together with other supporting documentation (proof of undergraduate qualifications, undergraduate course results etc) are submitted to the Postgraduate Office, which is then forwarded to the Academic Leader: Research for approval. Once approval is provided, you will receive communication from the Postgrad Office.
You will now need to register with the University, and register for the specific modules. Make sure that you have registered for the necessary module for your qualifications. For the MMedSci, you need to register for the module OCEH81F, while for the MMed, you need to register for the OCEH8RP module. This must now be submitted to the College of Health Sciences Postgraduate Office. You can contact Ms. Michelle Ramlal Ramlalm@ukzn.ac.za or call 0312601075 for further assistance.
At this point in time, you should apply for your research scholarship that is made available by the College of Health Sciences. You need to visit the Scholarships Application page for this online application. These supporting documents (and this) allow you to complete these online forms.
Once your registration is approved, you have six months in which to submit your proposal (but we hope that you can get this done in a much shorter timeframe, for reasons listed below)
Step 2: Thinking about the research idea
If you are accepted into the research programme and registered, then its time to think about your research idea. You will be asked by your supervisor to revise your concept document . In addition, you will need to complete the following documents: the Student-Supervisor Memorandum of Understanding and a the UKZN Plagiarism Policy. You need to review the following documents as well: the CHS Guidelines for Postgraduate Supervision; ); the Approved CHS Guidelines for presentation of MMed and and the UKZN Plagiarism Policy.
Before you start floundering in the wilderness and plucking ideas from the clouds, here are some guidelines to think about:
1. Do you have access to a substantial dataset, such as hygiene monitoring data, medical surveillance data etc? It is always better for a coursework dissertation to use an existing dataset, rather than trying to collect new data, which is time consuming and resource demanding. It is also easier to obtain ethical clearance for working with existing datasets (see later about Ethics).
2. Trying to do something at the place you work may generally be a starting point, providing you are working at a large company or have access to datasets indicated above. If you have an idea that you think may work at your company, then discuss it with the academic staff in the Discipline at your interview. You may also have access to other companies that may be a useful site for research.
3. Chat to the consultants in the Department. They may be working on a large project which could spawn off a masters project for you, or they could have access to a dataset that you could analyse. Generally, this approach is about the best, as it means that the project already has ethical approval, is likely to be funded, and is already well organised. If you choose your own project, you will have to take the lead in all these aspects.
4. Think about who you want to supervise you – and try to develop some research ideas around their areas of interest.
5. Think about something that is of interest to you and discuss this with your potential supervisor.
At this point, you will be expected to undertake advanced training in epidemiology and biostatistics. You will cover the material in the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology and Biostatistics module which will be provided to you on a disk or via Moodle. You will be expected to complete the online advanced Biostatistics modules (Biostatistics I and Biostatistics II)
Step 3: Preparing the Proposal
Once your research concept has been agreed to with your supervisor, and you have worked through the aims and objectives, you need to develop a more comprehensive proposal. You will need to use this template for the writing of this document. We demand a very high standard in proposal writing, so do not be surprised if you have repeated re-writes of your proposal – and do not be surprised if your final proposal looks very different from your original idea. We encourage our masters and doctoral students to present their proposals at our Departmental Academic Days, which takes place on Fridays – this has a very useful peer-review function. Please contact Dr. Sujatha Hariparsad who will direct you to the co-ordinator of our Academic Days to obtain a date for your presentation. Once your supervisor is satisfied with the quality of your proposal, you will be advised to submit to the Postgraduate Education Committee (PGEC).
Step 4: Doing a Literature Review
This is a critical step in your training. It requires time, patience and much intellectual input. Apart from the data analysis and final writing up, this is probably the most important intellectual task. When writing up your proposal, you are going to need to access journals to do your literature review. Conduct your search using PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) or Google Scholar – DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SEARCH ENGINE, particularly the commercial search engines such as google or yahoo. You will get the abstract from these site. Do NOT write your review based on abstracts. You need to obtain the full text of that article, either the hardcopy from the library, or an electronic copy.
Once you have a list of the articles that you want, you may need to go to the journal website itself to get the full text of the article. Many journals are available on-line. The university subscribes to the many online journals. As a registered student, you can download the full text of some articles either from on-campus or if you have internet access, from home, without paying. If you wish to access this from home, then this must be done via the University proxy servers. Go to the UKZN library ezproxy page via this link. Once here, click on e-Journals A-Z. You will then be prompted to enter your student login and password. You must have obtained this from the IT Services on campus to do this. This takes you to a page from which you can either search for a specific article or a particular journal. If the University subscribes to that journal, you will be able to access the articles without paying for it. Sometimes the University only subscribes to the hardcopy version of the journal, in which case, you will need to go to the library to obtain a copy.
At this point, it is very useful to use Reference Manager software to manage all the articles you review. The University subscribes to End Note which is an excellent programme. This allows you to save your references, and when writing up your proposal, and subsequently, your dissertation, it will insert your citation and create a reference list for you. The library manager at UKZN can advise you on when they run courses on such software.
Step 5: Developing your research instruments
As you work with your supervisor, you will need to develop the necessary instruments to collect your data. This may be in the form of questionnaires, data capture forms, standardised clinical assessment instruments, standardised environmental assessment instruments or standardised protocols. Remember that the best research instruments are those that have been field tested. So check the web (http://scholar.google.com/ is one place to start) to find out whether the instruments necessary for your project have been used in research previously. If you’re doing respiratory health research, here are some questionnaires that you could use:
The European Community Respiratory Health Study
The National Institution for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Questionnaire
The International Study of Asthma and Allergy in Childhood Questionnaire
There are several others for ergonomics, work stress etc. Do not attempt to develop your own from scratch without checking whether there have been others previously. If you do develop your own, then you will need to validate the instrument in a pilot first. If you use a validated one, then you may need to modify this to suit your population. Discuss with your supervisor.
All questionnaires must be first done in English, then translated by a linguist into the language of the participants – this may mean translating into 2-3 languages. Once translated, another linguist must back-translate the translated version back into English. You then need to compare to make sure that the translated version is asking the same questions as the original English version.
Similarly, as you develop your protocol, you need to provide the detail for your other health assessments, such as lung function testing, neurological assessments, ergonomic assessments, audiometry etc. For all of these tests, you must provide references of internationally acceptable methods for performing these tests.
You will have to provide similar detail for your exposure assessment as well. You will need to refer to acceptable methods of sampling, either NIOSH validated methods or discuss with your supervisor and an occupational hygienist for references related to method validation.
Step 6: Getting your proposal reviewed
Once your supervisor is happy that your proposal is ready for submission, then you need to proceed with the Ethics Application using this form. You will need to submit this via Ms. Michelle Ramlall (details above) to the Biomedical Research Ethics Committee (BREC). Please note that the BREC subjects your proposal to careful review. The PGEC sends out your proposal to reviewers, who then send back comments. You are then expected to respond to these comments by working with your supervisor. These comments are then considered by the reviewers, and if they are happy, then BREC accepts your proposal, and sends you a letter confirming this. You should anticipate a period of at least three months for this review process to be complete.
Should you be using an already collected dataset, or participating in a project for which ethics clearance has already been obtained, then you will need to do an expedited review. Discuss this with your supervisor. As part of your application you may require letters from “gatekeepers” indicating their willingness to grant you access. These “gatekeepers” could be managers at a factory or other workplace. In the case of research being done in the public sector health facilities, you must get approval from the Department of Health in Pietermaritzburg (the Health Research and Knowledge Management), or from local government Department of Health for local government clinics. Generally these higher level departments will require that you get approvals from the local clinic or hospital manager as well. BREC will only give you provisional approval until you get formal letters of approval from the “gatekeepers”
In addition to the above, you will need to complete a course in research ethics. This can be done online, and the certificate must accompany your BREC application. The BREC website lists several online sites, including the US National Institutes of Health course, which is most recommended.
Once you have received approval from BREC you are ready to start your research, which you will do under the guidance of your supervisor.
Step 7: Preparing the groundwork for the fieldwork
While you are awaiting your ethical approval, makes profitable use of the few months. Given that you will already have had gatekeeper approval, start working with organisations representing the participants (unions, community based organisations, non-governmental organisations, etc). You need to inform them of the project, how it is going to benefit their constituency or their organisation directly. From this engagement, you will learn better the do’s and don’ts when you start to select your sample. You could also organise community or workplace meetings to explain your research plan to the groups from which your sample will be drawn. Address any concerns they may have, and get them to understand the benefits of your research for them directly, for those exposed generally. Be frank and honest. Indicate to them the risks of participating.
This also presents an opportunity to develop the research logistics. If this is at a workplace, how will it affect the production process; if it is at a school, how will it affect teaching and learning; if it is at a hospital, how will it affect patient care? How much of time of those participating will be necessary either away from the factory floor or from their ability to care for patients etc. This plan must be finalised with management and trade unions prior to the commencement of the study.
Step 8: Capturing your data
There are several ways to capture your data. Using an MS Excel spreadsheet is one convenient way. You can set up the spreadsheet to accept only certain values. This ensures that you do not make entry mistakes. If you are working with a large dataset, containing lots of numbers, then double entry is a must. This means that you, and preferably someone else captures the data on two separate occasions, and then compare to see if there are any mistakes.
Capture your data using codes (ie. Numbers) rather than text. For example for sex, capture 0 or 1 where 0=female; 1=male, rather than F and M. Similarly for worksites, capture 1, 2 or 3 where 1=shaft; 2=surface; 3=face, rather than text. This assists in your analysis later on. But REMEMBER TO KEEP A CODING SHEET OR CODE DICTIONARY! Losing what these codes mean is a disaster later on!
Other means of capturing data include using Epi-Info, also SPSS or STATA, which are available from the University. Our Departmental preference is to use STATA. STATA allows you to capture your data in Excel and then easily import into STATA for analysis. This is the approach our researchers take in the Department.
Step 9: Analysing your data
The advantage of using a programme like Epi-Info, SPSS or STATA for data capture, is that you can directly analyse your data in that particular package. Epi-Info tends to be the easiest for newcomers. Please note that you will have to do your data analysis yourself, and not hand over to a biostatistician to do the work. You can obviously get advice from the latter. You will work systematically with your supervisor to do the analysis. We encourage you to present your analyses as you progress with your work to the Departmental meetings. You will receive critical review and guidance through this process.
Step 10: Writing up your dissertation
Once you have done your analysis, you commence with the next challenging task – the final task….the write-up. You are encouraged to write this up in the form of have a journal article that can be accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal.
The Research Project Guidelines provides you with the details about how you should go about doing this. The attached dissertation template allows you to commence writing, without changing any styles or fonts. You are encouraged to use this.
Your supervisor will review your dissertation and make comments. Be prepared for substantial re-writes. The policy in our Department is that your dissertation is not submitted to Postgraduate Education Committee for examination until the supervisor is convinced that your dissertation will pass the examination process. This may mean several revisions of your dissertation. At some stage it is worthwhile having your dissertation proofread for grammar and language style by experts. There are several people out there doing this, one is Desré Stead, Perlego Information Consulting, Tel/Fax: 031 701 2013, Cell: 073 138 6221, email: desre@perlego.co.za , web: www.perlego.co.za. Although this can be quite costly, having an examiner wade through tons of grammatical errors, poor sentence construction etc, can be frustrating, and likely to present your dissertation in a poor light, no matter how good the science
Step 11: The Examination Process
Once you have done your analysis, you commence with the next challenging task – the final task….the write-up. You are encouraged to write this up in the form of have a journal article that can be accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal.
The Research Project Guidelines provides you with the details about how you should go about doing this. The attached dissertation template allows you to commence writing, without changing any styles or fonts. You are encouraged to use this.
Your supervisor will review your dissertation and make comments. Be prepared for substantial re-writes. The policy in our Department is that your dissertation is not submitted to Postgraduate Education Committee for examination until the supervisor is convinced that your dissertation will pass the examination process. This may mean several revisions of your dissertation. At some stage it is worthwhile having your dissertation proofread for grammar and language style by experts. There are several people out there doing this, one is Desré Stead, Perlego Information Consulting, Tel/Fax: 031 701 2013, Cell: 073 138 6221, email: desre@perlego.co.za , web: www.perlego.co.za. Although this can be quite costly, having an examiner wade through tons of grammatical errors, poor sentence construction etc, can be frustrating, and likely to present your dissertation in a poor light, no matter how good the science