Graduate Student Internship Program

2009 Catalog of Internship Opportunities

Research Associate

Orange County Health Department, Women's Health Program, Orlando, FL
Skill Area: Data Analysis and Monitoring

Agency Information

The Women's Health Program located within the Orange County Health Department in Orlando, Florida, will be the host program for the internship project.  The Women's Health program offers both family planning and maternal care services. Currently the program operates out of five clinical sites and has 65 full and part time staff including three medical doctors. With a yearly unduplicated client base of over 5,000, the program is one of the largest prenatal care and family planning providers in Orange County.

Purpose, goals, and objectives of internship

As a major provider of prenatal care services in Orange County, the Women's Health Program is interested in determining the birth outcomes for their maternity clients. The Program currently has both the client level and birth outcome data necessary for the project analysis. Purpose: To determine the rates of prematurity, cesarean section deliveries, very and low birth weight infants among clients of the Orange County Health Department's Women Health Program.

Goals: (1) Examine birth outcomes for selected indicators. (2) Examine the racial/ethnic differences in selected birth outcome indicators. (3) Produce an in-depth report based on the analytic findings.

Objectives: (1) Link local client records with state-level vital statistics records using Social Security numbers, which are included in both data sets. (2) Calculate the crude and adjusted rates for prematurity, cesarean section, very low and low birth weight deliveries. (3) Examine/Compare the racial/ethnic differences in the crude and adjusted rates for the selected indictors given above. (4) Provide a written analytic report on the calculated rates and racial/ethnic comparison findings.

Data or analytic tasks and activities

• Crude and adjusted rates calculations  
• Comparison of mean differences
• Produce simple regression models and dataset linkages

Data or analytic skills required

The internship would require a working knowledge of SPSS and Excel. The intern should be able to use SPSS to produce simple frequencies, independent samples t-test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and simple regression models. The internship will also require the ability to import Excel spreadsheets into SPSS and link datasets by unique identifiers in SPSS.

Supervisors

Sylvia M. Davis, MPH will be providing the data and analytic related technical assistance for the intern.

Internship begins

May 2009

Housing

There are a number of apartment complexes either within walking distance or a small driving distance from the worksite.

Transportation

The work site is also located near a major public transportation route.

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