Department of Family Medicine Research Project Guidelines

Department of Family Medicine guidelines for your project:

1. Decide on a research topic.

• What interests you?  Identify a problem or question. 
• What information is available currently on your topic? Make sure that data will be available or will be able to be collected.
• Is there an existing data set available that you can use?
• Projects can also be a continuation of a faculty or previous medical student’s research.

1. Contact the Family Medicine Project Coordinator to discuss your ideas, interests, questions, goals, and help with determining which faculty member would be most fitting.
2. Meet with a faculty advisor.  Prior to the meeting:
   • Complete a literature review of your area of interest- review publications on your topic of interest or the faculty member’s topic of interest.
   • Write down your questions.
   • Develop your possible specific “research questions”.  Have more than one research question to select from for your project.
3. Conduct a more detailed literature search on your research question.
4. Determine the timeline, goals, design and methods of your project. Develop any surveys you will use.
5. Complete CITI training. Submit your project to IRB (assume a minimum of 2 months for approval).  Note: If you use only non-WSU, de-identified data sets, you will not need to submit to IRB, but you will still need to get your CITI training completed. If you are continuing a faculty or resident’s project that is already IRB approved, you will just need to be added to the existing IRB protocol.
6. After IRB approval, collect data.
7. Conduct data analysis, interpret the findings, and prepare presentations.

• WSUBSOM Medical Student Research Symposium is in the spring.
• WSUBSOM Central Research Forum is in the fall.
• If you are working with a resident, DAGMEC is in the spring.