Methods Related Resources

Led by Methods Core Co-Directors Drs. Dan Feaster and Raymond Balise, the Feaster & Balise lab consists of faculty and research staff with domain expertise in Substance Abuse, HIV/AIDS, and Cancer Research. The team is at the forefront of applied statistical analysis, machine learning, and data science.

Learn more about the lab HERE. 

And access lab tools, tutorials, and packages HERE. 

• CDC National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention (NCHHSTP) AtlasPlus is an interactive tool that gives users the ability to create customized tables, maps, and charts using nearly 20 years of CDC's surveillance data on HIV, viral hepatitis, STD, and TB. AtlasPlus also provides access to indicators on social determinants of health (SDOH) allowing users to view social and economic data in conjunction with surveillance data for each disease.
• AIDSVu is an interactive online mapping tool that visualizes the impact of the HIV epidemic on communities across the United States.
• PowerViz is an online web application to visualize statistical power calculations, especially useful for understanding the cause-effect relationship of study testing parameters to overall power. It uses an existing R package (pwr) to drive the calculations, but supplemented with graphics that adjust in real-time to user inputs. This tool can be used by students enhance their learning of stats concepts or initial study design phases for more effective planning.
• EpiMatch is a web application where users upload study population demographics and apply a case-control matching algorithm. Once finished, the app returns complete matches to the user. The benefit is a reduction in the time required to conduct the matching while simultaneously reducing biases that may influence the matching or downstream analyses.
• Feaster & Balise Lab Tools 
• Data & Visualization Services at the University of Miami Libraries provide training and computing resources related to data analysis, data management, and data visualization.
• REDCap Training Videos (Via REDCap Website)

• Sex Drugs and REDCap: How to Collect Research Data on HIV and Substance Abuse 
  • This training includes the steps to develop a screening survey and study e-consent, program randomization into study groups considering race, and tracking of specimen collection over a year.
• Reproducible Research with R, RStudio, and GitHub: How modern software is helping HIV Research
• See our YouTube page for other Methods Core recordings, including our CHARM Tech Talks. 
• Dealing with REDCap Survey Scamming - Slides (video coming soon!)

• HealthMeasures consists of PROMIS, Neuro-QoL, ASCQ-Me, and NIH Toolbox. These four precise, flexible, and comprehensive measurement systems assess physical, mental, and social health, symptoms, well-being and life satisfaction; along with sensory, motor, and cognitive function.
• REDCap Shared Library is a repository for REDCap data collection instruments and forms that can be downloaded and used by researchers at REDCap partner institutions. Curated instruments have been approved for inclusion by the REDCap Library Oversight Committee (REDLOC) after review for research relevance, accuracy in function and coding (see guidelines), and copyright issues.
• CLaRO-CHARM Measures Library facilitates access to measures for researcher use, and particularly aims to advance capacity for research with non-English speaking participants through this collection of measures with Spanish and Haitian Creole translations.
• NIH CDE Repository: 
  • Common Data Elements (CDEs) are data elements (or variables) that are defined and used the same way across multiple studies, to standardize the way data is collected. The NIH CDE Repository can help you identify CDEs for your data management plan and your research. 
• NIMH Common Data Elements is a minimal list of data collection instruments that would be ideal for use by all mental health researchers conducting clinical research to facilitate and harmonize mental health data collection. 

CNICS is a medical record-based network which integrates clinical data reflecting current decisions and outcomes in the care of people with HIV.  Patient data is collected from 10 CFAR sites with HIV clinics that have implemented point of care electronic data collection systems. This dataset captures data regarding diabetes management including validated outcomes, longitudinal resistance (and other) data, and detailed patient reported outcomes (PROs) with readily available biological specimens.

CNICS is an open access database that is available to any investigator at no cost.

Before submitting a concept, proposal and gaining access to CNICS data you should complete the following steps:

3. Check Feasibility: You will need to submit a Study Feasibility Form to determine if your study is unique and data is available and submit a Specimen Feasibility Form to inquire about specimens.
   • Study Feasibility and Specimen Feasibility Form
4. Submit a Concept: You must find a CNICS Collaborator before submitting a Concept Proposal Application. You should work with their collaborator to form their proposal and have their concept approved by collaborator before submitting your concept. Once ready, you can submit your Concept Proposal Application via email to Mary Thielen and Donna Porter.
   • Information on the CNICS collaborator program can be found here. 
   • CNICS Collaborator Request Form
5. Review call with Research Coordinating Committee (RCC): The RCC will review the proposal and determine if revisions are necessary. If revisions are requested, you will need to submit tracked changes and an informal review will determine if comments were addressed.
6. Decision made and submit IRB and Data Request Form
   • The Data Request Form
7. Poll for Site Participation: CNICS sites will be polled to request a representative to serve as a site contact and member of your team.
8. Acquire Data: Data requests will be sent to the Data Management Core (DMC)

For more information visit the CNICS website. 

The NIDA Data Share website holds data from completed NIDA-funded clinical trials. The data on this website is openly available to researchers and the public. The information posted per protocol includes:

1. Study protocol
2. Reference to study publication of primary outcomes
3. Data sets (SAS and ASCII)
4. Annotated case report forms
5. Define file (also known as Data Dictionary)
6. Study specific de-identification notes

To gain access to data, you will need to complete a registration agreement for data use by registering your name, e-mail address, and accept responsibility for using data in accordance with the NIDA Data Share Agreement.

For more information visit the NIDA Data Share Website. 

The ABCD study is an NIH-funded long-term study of brain development and child health in the US. This study collects data on childhood experiences including smoking, sleep patterns and social media and how these experiences interact with each other and a child’s biology to affect brain development and other health and psychosocial outcomes. Participants are invited to participate in the study from ages 9-10 and are followed over the course of 10 years.

Data is made accessible to researchers by the NIMH Data Archive (NDA). To access the data, you can create an account at NDA and request access to the ABCD Study data through the NDA dashboard. Once access is requested, this will generate a Data Use Agreement/Certification (DUC) which outlines the rules researchers must follow when using ABCD data. The DUC will need be signed by an Institutional Signing Officer within your institution. Once signed and uploaded to the dashboard, the NDA will review your application and grant access to the data accordingly.

• An NDA account can be created through the NDA Dashboard. 

For more information visit the ABCD Study website. 

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of over 20,000 adolescents who were in grades 7-12 during the 1994-95 school year, and have been followed for five waves to date, most recently in 2016-18. Over the years, Add Health has collected rich demographic, social, familial, socioeconomic, behavioral, psychosocial, cognitive, and health survey data from participants and their parents; a vast array of contextual data from participants’ schools, neighborhoods, and geographies of residence; and in-home physical and biological data from participants, including genetic markers, blood-based assays, anthropometric measures, and medications. Ancillary studies have added even more data over the years. Data from the project are available in various forms and have been analyzed in thousands of publications in peer-reviewed journals.

The Add Health study has collected data of interest to investigators from many disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences and from many theoretical traditions, making it a global data resource for over 50,000 researchers. The Add Health data is available in two forms, public-use data and restricted-use data, and offer endless options in the types of analysis, choices of data, and presentation. Please follow instructions to access public-use and restricted-use data are located.

For more information visit the Add Health website. 

In January 2019, the following two long-term HIV studies aligned their data and combined to form the MWCCS:

• MACS was a 30-year study of HIV in homosexual and bisexual men. MACS enrolled more than 7,300 study participants with its consortium of 4 clinical research sites and a data coordinating center.
• WIHS was the largest and longest ongoing cohort study of women with HIV in the United States. WIHS began in 1993 at six clinical consortium sites.

The MWCCS includes more than 4,000 active participants, both with and without HIV, and is recruiting up to 1,500 new participants (one-third of whom are between the ages of 18 and 40). The effort will study high-priority research on HIV outcomes, including prevalence, pathology, etiology, mechanisms, treatment, and prevention of morbidity and mortality related to HIV, its treatment, and the intersection of HIV and aging and the contextual factors common in the lives of those with HIV. Learn more about the characteristics of cohort participants in the article Characteristics of the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study: Opportunities for Research on Aging with HIV in the Longest US Observational Study of HIV.

All investigators (who are not a grant-supported investigator at a MWCCS clinical research site) should have a study liaison. To work with MWCCS data, investigators will need to submit a concept sheet. Prior to submitting a concept sheet, investigators must check for overlap with existing MWCCS projects using the Public View in our project tracking database DACCTrack. See the Guidelines for Investigators document that offers more specific details about proposing research in MWCCS and IRB requirements. 

For more information visit the MWCCS website for UM. 

Or the MWCCS national website. 

The Study of Treatment And Reproductive outcomes in women (STAR) cohort seeks to answer questions related to the effects of HIV infection and HIV-related medical conditions on women of reproductive age. It builds on the work of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), which was developed in 1993 and is one of the largest federally funded longitudinal cohort studies comprising of almost 4,000 women living with HIV (WLWH) or at-risk for HIV infection. Recently, WIHS transitioned to combine with the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), which is a cohort of gay and bisexual men, to form the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study (MWCCS). Utilizing the backbone of the MWCCS, STAR was developed to obtain information on reproductive age WLWH and those at risk for HIV infection, focusing on the Southern region of the US.

STAR study sites will recruit and retain 2,000 reproductive age women who are HIV-positive and HIV-negative.

• Atlanta, GA
• Birmingham, AL/Jackson, MS
• Chapel Hill, NC
• Miami, FL
• Washington, DC

All investigators must have a STAR PI sponsor for their concept sheet submission. Submission of a concept sheet research plan is required for all proposed investigations involving analyses using existing data sets, the collection of new data (questionnaires, clinical, and physical measures), and/or use or collection of laboratory specimens. Please review the STAR Concept Sheet Submission Process.

For more information visit the STAR website.