Grant and ethics applications for academic research often involve proposals for data collection and analysis. These applications generally involve a number of hurdles for researchers, to convince reviewers that their use of data is appropriate and properly planned. They also serve as valuable reference documents setting out the methodology in the research project. These grant and ethics applications generally include a description of methodology and data, proposed statistical analysis, and sample size calculations/justification.

This talk will give advice from the perspective of a statistician, as to how to frame your information in a way that is as clear and convincing as possible, and make it easy to read and understand for a statistical reviewer. I will aim this talk primarily at HDR students, but it will also contain material that may be useful for experienced researchers. Among other things, I will give you some tips to describe your proposed statistical modelling work without locking yourself into decisions you may come to regret later, and I will give you some advice on how to sound statistically competent (rather than sounding like you are vomiting statistical jargon at the reviewer).

About Ben O'Niell

Dr O’Neill is a statistician and data scientist specialising in experimental design and applied statistical modelling. He has broad research interests in all aspects of statistical theory and modelling, causal analysis and experimental design. He has expertise in statistical programming in R, and is also a regular contributor to the statistical Q&A website CrossValidated. He previously worked as a Lecturer in Statistics at UNSW, and has done a number of projects as a statistical consultant with various government and industry bodies. He joined RSPH in September 2018.