This 4-day course will run online and will consist of a mixture of lectures, small group work and computing practicals. Participants are encouraged to do the computing practicals on their own computer in breakout rooms with the help of a tutor. All sessions will be live.

By the end of the course participants should:

1. have a thorough understanding of the potential (counterfactual) outcomes approach to defining causal effects;
2. be able to implement Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to document assumptions and inform analysis plans;
3. understand the key sources of bias in analyses of observational data, and how to investigate them using DAGs; and
4. appreciate key methods which can be used to estimate causal effects, and understand the assumptions underlying them.

This course is aimed at epidemiologists, statisticians and other quantitative researchers. Applicants must have knowledge and experience of a variety of linear and logistic regression models and their implementation in Stata, to beyond the level achieved in the Introduction to Linear and Logistic Regression Models course.

Familiarity with survival analysis is recommended.

We recommend that you do not attend this course in the same year that you have attended Introduction to Linear and Logistic Regression Models.

This course will introduce participants to concepts of and methods for, causal inference in epidemiological research, with a focus on their application.

The course will cover:

1. potential (counterfactual) outcomes;
2. causal diagrams (DAGs);
3. confounding and methods to control for confounding (stratification, regression, propensity scores and inverse probability weighting);
4. selection and information biases;
5. model selection;
6. instrumental variable estimation, including analysis of Mendelian randomization studies;
7. time-varying confounding, marginal structural models and other g-methods;
8. intention-to-treat and per-protocol effects in randomized trials;
9. emulating a randomized trial using observational data;
10. study designs for causal inference; and
11. triangulation.

The teaching faculty for this course include:

Professor Jonathan Sterne
Professor Kate Tilling
Professor Deborah Lawlor
Professor Abigail Fraser
Dr Tom Palmer
Dr Paul Madley-Dowd
Dr Kate Birnie
Dr Rosie Cornish
Dr Amy Taylor
Dr Raquel Granell
Dr Venexia Walker
Dr Ana Goncalves Soares
Dr Chin Yang Shapland
Dr Daisy Gaunt

To make sure the course is suitable for you and you will benefit from attending, please ensure you meet the following prerequisites before booking:

Before booking this course, please make sure you read the information provided above about the target audience and prerequisites. It is important that you have access to the relevant IT resources needed for the course and meet the knowledge prerequisites to ensure you can get the most from the course.

Bookings are taken via our online booking system, for which you must register an account. To check if you are eligible for free or discounted courses please see our fees and voucher packs page. All bookings are subject to our terms & conditions, which can be read in full here.

For help and support with booking a course refer to our booking information page, FAQs or feel free to contact us directly. For available payment options please see: How to pay your short course fees.

Participants are granted access to our virtual learning platform (Blackboard) 1 to 2 weeks in advance of the course. This allows time for any pre-course work to be completed and to familiarise with the platform.

To gain the most from the course, we recommend that you attend in full and participate in all interactive components. We endeavour to record all live lecture sessions and upload these to the online learning environment within 24 hours. This allows course participants to review these sessions at leisure and revisit them multiple times. Please note that we do not record breakout sessions.

All course participants retain access to the online learning materials and recordings for 3 months after the course. 

University of Bristol staff and postgraduate students who do not wish to attend the full course may instead register for access to the 'Materials & Recordings' version of this course: Further information and bookings.

97% of attendees recommend this course*.
*Attendee feedback from 2022-2023.

Here is a sample of feedback from the last run of the course:

"How the course flowed and built on earlier lectures and prac. was excellent and helped to cement what is otherwise a complex topic".
Course feedback, July 2023.

“The practicals were really helpful and the content was all really informative”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“Overall the course was balanced really well and the shift from topic to topic was intuitive”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“The lecturers are so knowledgeable ("here's a seminal paper we published on this...") but were also really good at explaining things & answering questions”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“It was great having the lectures recorded to go back to”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“This was a fanstastic course - excellent lectures and practicals”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“I think the instructors were all highly skilled, knowledgeable and helpful. It was a good atmosphere where one was not shy to ask questions. The recordings of the sessions are very helpful to have now”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“Excellent course. Top quality standard of teaching”.
Course feedback, July 2023.

“Feel much more prepared to see potential faults in my study design now!”
Course feedback, July 2023.

“Complex concepts clearly explained, well organised, and topics organised in a clear logical manner, things flowed nicely on from each other”.
Course feedback, July 2023.