Impact of hands-on training in STATA for data management and data analysis: How much knowledge gained among health-care professionals?

Abstract

Objectives: Data management and statistical analysis are integral parts of any research. But there is difficulty in cleaning, organizing, and maintaining data in a systematic and meaningful way for accurate analysis without any tool. Hence, there is a need to learn a tool such as SPSS, STATA, R, SAS and so many for understanding the data. This study focused on the impact of short-course training on STATA on healthcare eye professionals and found an improvement in their competency to use computer-based statistical software packages for data management and analysis and identify the major challenges for participants and suggestions to improve the training. Materials and Methods: We organized a 10-day short course on data management and data analysis using STATA. A pre and post-test evaluation was done every day to find the impact. The questionnaire covered several areas of research methodology from data management to statistics. Categorical data were described in frequency and percentage whereas continuous data was described in median and interquartile range (IQR). Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to find out the significant improvement in the knowledge. Results: The 10 days cumulative median score for pre- and post-test was 43 (IOR = 39-47.5) and 72.5 (IOR = 69-77) respectively and was statistically significant (P = 0.012). Male participants, younger age groups, experience, and prior knowledge were identified as major determinants to improve the knowledge and performance in the usage of STATA. We observed that advanced training in the usage of STATA is highly beneficial to people interested/involved in research to gain autonomy in data management and analysis. Conclusion: The evaluation of the training confirms that hands-on training in the use of STATA software does have a significant impact on the knowledge, self-efficacy, and attitude of the learner. Since Stata is very user-friendly, we recommend that researchers and medical students should be offered a comprehensive training course in STATA.