Department of Family Medicine guidelines for your project:
-
Decide on a research topic.
- What interests you? Identify a problem or question.
- What information is available currently on your topic? Make sure that data will be available or will be able to be collected.
- Is there an existing data set available that you can use?
- Projects can also be a continuation of a faculty or previous medical student’s research.
-
Contact the Family Medicine Project Coordinator.
Contact the Family Medicine Project Coordinator to discuss your ideas, interests, questions, goals, and help with determining which faculty member would be most fitting.
-
Meet with a faculty advisor.
Prior to the meeting:
- Complete a literature review of your area of interest- review publications on your topic of interest or the faculty member’s topic of interest.
- Write down your questions.
- Develop your possible specific “research questions”. Have more than one research question to select from for your project.
-
Conduct literature search.
Conduct a more detailed literature search on your research question.
-
Determine timeline and other details.
Determine the timeline, goals, design and methods of your project. Develop any surveys you will use.
-
Complete CITI training.
Complete CITI training. Submit your project to IRB (assume a minimum of 2 months for approval). Note: If you use only non-WSU, de-identified data sets, you will not need to submit to IRB, but you will still need to get your CITI training completed. If you are continuing a faculty or resident’s project that is already IRB approved, you will just need to be added to the existing IRB protocol.
-
Collect data.
After IRB approval, collect data.
-
Conduct data analysis, interpret the findings, and prepare presentations.
- WSUBSOM Medical Student Research Symposium is in the spring.
- WSUBSOM Central Research Forum is in the fall.
- If you are working with a resident, DAGMEC is in the spring.