Research Methods 4
Multivariate Analysis Coursework
Practical Report (1500 words)
Background
An important area of applied research concerns the factors that affect recovery from stroke and specifically, the factors that predict an ability to return to relatively independent daily living. There is a very large literature on the subject which looks at the predictive ability of motor, perceptual and cognitive factors, as well as more general factors such as the severity and location of the stroke and the age of the patient. Much of this research is reported in textbooks of neurology, neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology but two specific articles are:
Mercier, L., Audet, T., Hebert, R., Rochette, A & Dubois, M-F (2001). Impact of motor, cognitive, and perceptual disorders on ability to perform activities of daily living after stroke. Stroke, 32 pp 2602-2608. http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/32/11/2602.full
Lincoln, N. B., Blackburn, M., Ellis, S., Jackson, J., Edmans, J. A., Nouri, F. M., Walrer, M. F. And Haworth, H. (1989) An investigation of factors affecting progress of patients on a stroke unit. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 52 pp 493-496 http://jnnp.bmj.com (search the site).
The data to be analysed in this assignment comes from a pilot study from an Australian Honours Thesis by Cropper (1977). This pilot study compared four evaluation tools for assessing the recovery of patients who had recently suffered a stroke. The author went on to use some of these evaluation tools to compare different treatments for stroke. The dataset of the pilot study provide us with data from 20 stroke patients, for whom Cropper collected measures of perceptual functioning, motor functioning and the ability to perform daily living activities. The age, gender, location of stroke and times since stroke are also provided.
A brief description of this pilot study, including the full data set he used is at http://www.statsci.org/data/oz/strokeass.html....