Volunteer Request: Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine - 2021 Annual Survey of Internal

Medicine Residency Program Directors Summary Results Reporting

 

January 17, 2022


Overview
The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM) is a nonprofit, 501 (c)(3) professional association whose mission is to foster the advancement of learning, discovery, and caring by enhancing the professional growth of academic internal medicine faculty, administrators, and physicians-in-training. In furtherance of its mission, AAIM advances research and scholarship through member advisory committees that develop content for recurring research surveys on disciplinary trends and topics in medical education. AAIM consists of 26 staff members, including two Surveys and Research personnel. More about AAIM and its Surveys project may be viewed at https://www.im.org/data/surveys-data-main.


Request for Support
AAIM is in immediate need of a data analyst with strong intermediate training or higher in the Stata platform (Version 14 or higher) to report summary results (frequencies, percentages, measures of central tendency, creating a limited number of secondary/supporting variables) for its 2021 Annual Survey of Internal Medicine Residency Program Directors, which closed in December 2021. The work must be completed by February 8 and will be managed remotely. The estimated amount of time required to complete this work will depend on the analyst’s level of training in Stata and their level of experience with elementary survey data cleaning, but is estimated to range from 45 to 60 hours

Specifically, the analyst will provide summary results for the complete survey dataset and, ideally, export the results to (reasonably) match the style/template and reporting conventions used for AAIM survey summary results reports, including conventions for footnoting tables (e.g., numbers of item non-respondents). This will require limited data cleaning: the first part of the summary report includes population-level (n=546) residency program characteristics that do not need to be cleaned. The “thematic” (i.e., respondent-only) survey sections (n=267) will require limited cleaning (checking out-of-scope values, checking responses to questions with a type-in option for “other”). Knowledge of academic medicine is not necessary for this project. AAIM Surveys staff maintain copies of Stata syntax used for reporting previous years of this survey, but the thematic sections change each year. The Stata code generated by the analyst and the final de-identified dataset would be retained by AAIM for documentation and future applications such as scholarly works. Findings from these surveys have been published extensively by APDIM members (who draft and revise survey questions) in peer-reviewed journals such as Academic Medicine. For a representative list of publications, see “APDIM Survey Publications” at https://www.im.org/data/apdim-surveys.


The 2021 Survey thematic sections address issues in training internal medicine residents (bias and discrimination, equity in hiring key faculty, resident use of electronic health record systems) and the advisory committee that oversaw the survey development must begin drafting scholarly works once the summary results are available (the results report is made freely available as a .pdf file with a linked table of contents to AAIM’s roughly 10,000 members). This phase of the project will not culminate in a scholarly work unless the data analyst wishes to collaborate with any survey section authors should they be in need of support for secondary analyses. AAIM does not use any survey results or datasets for commercial purposes or applications and the 2021 Survey protocol (#21-AAIM-119) was granted exemption by Pearl IRB (U.S. DHHS OHRP #IRB00007772).

Qualifications

  • Strong intermediate training or higher in the Stata platform (Version 14 or higher), including the ability to carefully document one’s work using the Stata do-file editor. Knowledge of Stata functions/programming such as looping for repetitive tasks is beneficial for simplifying the work but not essential.
  • Ability to perform elementary data cleaning (e.g., editing out-of-scope values, recoding any simple write-in responses for “other”) by referring to the survey instrument for guidance. Please note that the web survey used a good deal of validation and conditional logic, to minimize the need for cleaning outlier data points.
  • Ideally, familiarity with Stata modules for exporting results in a custom format (to simplify the process), such as “tabout,” “putexcel,” or “putdocx.” The final results report will be formatted as a .pdf file, inclusive of table footnotes (where applicable) documenting, for example, item non-response and clarifying numerators/denominators for questions subject to survey logic.
  • Willingness to communicate with AAIM Surveys staff should the analyst be uncertain about how to handle the reporting of any variables that might seem problematic; willingness and ability to communicate freely with Surveys staff as needed.
  •  Adherence to SWB’s codes and expectations for maintaining data confidentiality and data security.


Process and Point of Contact
Interested volunteers should contact Michael Kisielewski, MA, AAIM Assistant Director of Surveys and Research, via email (contact information is below). It is expected that the volunteer already has access to a copy of Stata 14 up to Stata 17 (SE or higher). Staff will provide the analyst with a data confidentiality agreement and will provide access to the de-identified dataset, sample syntax, and copies of previous Annual Survey summary results reports and other useful documentation for guidance, via the secure Sync.com file sharing platform. Based on the analyst’s level of training, staff will discuss with them the most efficient and appropriate means of exporting the results from Stata to the MS Excel or MS Word environment. The analyst will be acknowledged for their role in producing these results and, should any survey section authors require support for secondary analyses for producing a scholarly work from their section, the analyst will be welcomed to serve in that role should they be interested. Typically, the production of scholarly works does not begin until at least one month after the survey advisory committee has received the summary results report from the Annual Survey.


Gratefully,
Michael
Michael R. Kisielewski, MA
Assistant Director of Surveys and Research
Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine
330 John Carlyle Street, Suite 610
Alexandria, VA 22314
Ph. 703-341-4540
703-519-1893 (fax)
mkisielewski@im.org