Seminar: Research Methods in Practice at KMIT Lad Krabang

The Seminar is a collaboration between academic scholars and government officers in Thailand where problems of national importance are tackled, on public health and environmental issues.
      According to World Health Organisation statistics, Thailand's age-standardised death rate is more than double that of Japan. However, strategies for reducing mortality in Thailand are complicated by the fact that most death certificates do not accurately report the cause of death. To address this problem, the Ministry of Public Health commissioned a study in 2005 to determine cause of death for a sample of 9644 deaths from nine provinces based on verbal autopsies. Using a systematic scientific method, Seminar presenters will show how the percentage of such ill-defined deaths in Thailand from 1996 to 2009 can be substantially reduced. But while this method can provide accurate estimates of death rates for major causes in populations classified by gender, age-group, province and year, it does not apply to individuals: forensic science is also needed. The Seminar will also feature a presentation by Dr Pornthip Rojanasunan, Thailand's chief forensic pathologist, who will talk about the methods she uses to determine true cause of death for individuals.
      The Seminar will also feature practical presentations on environmental studies important to Thailand, including climate change, land-use and aquatic ecology.
      The climate change presentations will focus on daily rainfalls reported from all weather stations in Thailand over the last decade, daily solar radiation energy levels collected from six cities around Thailand since 1970, and monthly average temperatures since 1909 from the 2592 5 by 5 degree grid boxes covering the Earth's surface.
      A huge volume of land-use data has been routinely collected by the Department of Lands since 1967, but gleaning land development trends from these data is complicated by the fact that land-use plots change and diversify over time. The Seminar presentations on Friday begin with the exposition of a method that tackles this problem simply by converting the plots from polygons to a digital structure, illustrated with examples of development since 1985 in Phuket and Krabi provinces and in the Songkla Lake basin.
      Another important issue of concern in Thailand is the quality of its ecosystems, and appropriate methods need to be developed to display and analyse routine data collections. To this end, data from ongoing environmental impact studies of aquatic animals, plants and water quality in the NaThap River and Ban Don Bay are presented, as well as monthly variations in sizes of resident species of bird flocks reported by rangers around Thale Noi.
      In the final session of the Seminar, Professor Don McNeil, assisted by some of his current and former graduate students, will explain why appropriate Research Methodology is needed to tackle the challenging human and environmental health problems that Thailand is now facing, focusing on a method that has wide-ranging application and for which easy-to-use computer software is available - Factor Analysis.


Dept of Mathematics & Computer Science, Faculty of Science & Technology, PSU Dept of Languages & Social Science, Faculty of Industrial Education, KMIT
Last updated: February 13, 2013