ECTS: 2.5
Course leader: Bodil Hammer Bech
Language: English
Graduate school: Faculty of Health
Graduate program: PH
Course fee: 3,000.00 DKK
Status: Course is open for application
Semester: Fall 2025
Application deadline: 21/10/2025
Cancellation deadline: 04/11/2025
Course type: Classroom teaching
Start date: 18/11/2025
Administrator: Lena Melchior
The course P155 Epidemiology I - Basic Principles of Epidemiology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, autumn 2025.
Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).
Requirements for participation: None
Aim: To teach basic epidemiologic study designs, measures of occurrence and association and interpretation and inference. Please see teaching objectives for details.
Learning outcomes: By the end of the course the student should be able to:
- Define epidemiologic measures of occurrence and explain the difference between prevalence and incidence
- Define the following epidemiologic measures of association; relative risk, risk ratio, odds ratio, and rate ratio, risk difference and excess risk, including attributable risk and population attributable risk
- Define and describe strengths, weaknesses, and main applications of the designs; ecological, cross-sectional, follow up, case-control and intervention studies
- Define selection bias, information bias and confounding and be aware that evaluating the direction and strength of a possible bias or confounding is essential
- Learn to think along the lines that, when faced with data from an analytic epidemiologic study showing an association (or no association), this might reflect; random error, bias (systematic error), including selection bias or information bias, or confounding, or, if all other possibilities seem unlikely, causality
Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 28 hours
Content: Epidemiologic measures of occurrence and association, study designs - including macro-epidemiological, cross-sectional, case-control and cohort studies as well as experimental, randomized controlled trials - interpretation and inference, including random error, selection and information bias, confounding and effect modification. A specific session will deal with causation.
Instructors: Bodil Hammer Bech, Ulrik Schiøler Kesmodel
Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus.
Participation in the course is without cost for:
- PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
- PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
- PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses
Course dates:
- 18 November 2025 08:30 - 15:30
- 19 November 2025 08:30 - 15:30
- 20 November 2025 08:30 - 15:30
- 21 November 2025 08:30 - 15:30