Course Epidemiology I - Basic Principles of Epidemiology

The course C155/ Epidemiology I - Basic Principles of Epidemiology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2026.

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: Ulrik Schiøler Kesmodel, Bodil Hammer Bech

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:

• 09 November 2026 08:30 - 15:30
• 10 November 2026 08:30 - 15:30
• 11 November 2026 08:30 - 15:30
• 12 November 2026 08:30 - 15:30