Statistics and Data Coordinating Center

University Of California, San Francisco, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The Statistics and Data Coordinating Center (S&DCC) for the proposed renewal of the UCSF Center to Address Disparities in Children's Oral Health (nicknamed CAN DO 2) will serve the biostatistical and database management needs of the projects. The S&DCC will build upon and expand successes as the Biostatistics and Research Data Core for the UCSF Comprehensive Oral Health Research Center of Discovery (P60 DE13058) and as the Measurement & Evaluation Core of the first CAN DO funding period. Moreover, the S&DCC will leverage its substantial expertise and capacities with those of the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI), a first-round NIH/NCRR-funded Clinical and Translational Science Award that began in 2006. An advantage to a central coordinating center is that involvement in numerous projects and protocols allows exposure to problems that are pervasive throughout numerous studies yet may appear relatively minor within a narrower context. (1) A central S&DCC, building upon earlier projects and expertise in dental research and analysis, will enable more efficient and productive interactions with investigators than consulting with separate epidemiologists, biostatisticians, psychometricians, anthropologists, communications experts, geographers, programmers and data managers. Moreover, consistent S&DCC personnel working on related projects makes interdisciplinary connection and innovation easier to target as well as feasible and efficient. Databases will continue to be developed within a unified framework for coding, entry, and storage; additionally the S&DCC will contribute to the NIDCR Collaborative Working Group (CWG) to establish common data elements across Centers. The S&DCC will also extend or develop research and analytic methodologies, when necessary, to provide solutions for CAN DO 2 projects. The S&DCC's goals are to foster achieving and maintaining the highest ethical, research design, procedural, data management and analytic standards.