Welcome to the course

Welcome to our course ‘Global Disability: Research and Evidence’.

Your Lead Educators are:

Hannah Kuper – Director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Tom Shakespeare – Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Course overview

This three week course has been developed by the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. We have received input from a large number of people with disabilities, researchers and other stakeholders from around the world in putting the course together.

The course is designed to familiarise learners with disability research – why it is important and how it can be done.

This course complements our other course Global Health & Disability, which explores global disability and disability rights in relation to health, rehabilitation, development and humanitarianism. We would love to see you on this course as well, and you can enrol here. Completing both courses is not essential, but they provide complementary content.

What will we learn?

Over the next three weeks we will familiarise learners with typical research methods used in the field of global health and disability, and approaches to interpreting and evaluating evidence. Together, we will aim to answer the following questions:

• Why do we need evidence about disability?
• How can people with disabilities be meaningfully included throughout the research cycle?
• What are the common methods used in disability research?
• Why do we need to, and how can we measure disability and its impact?
• What is an appropriate outcome measure?
• How do we know if an intervention is effective?
• What are some of the additional ethical considerations for research in disability?
• How can data be analysed?
• What can go wrong in study design?
• How can evidence be used to inform practice?

We hope that by learning more about these issues, you will be able to recognise how you could collect data and interpret evidence on disability.

How will we learn?

We will use a variety of learning techniques including videos, articles, discussions and simple ways to test your learning. You will hear from people with disabilities, public health academics and international stakeholders, who will share their knowledge and experience with you.

Each step of this course will feature a ‘Comments’ section at the bottom of the page that you can use to share your thoughts and reflections. We are expecting learners from across the world and these discussions will help improve the learning for all of us.

When you are confident with the material and ideas covered in each step, please click on the pink button entitled ‘Mark as complete’ before using the arrow to continue. This will allow you to check your progress using the ‘Progress’ tab at the top of each page.

We have thoroughly enjoyed putting the course together and we hope that you will find the material thought-provoking, engaging and most of all, enjoyable!