About This Site
The purpose of this site is to provide a previously unavailable resource to Maternal and Child Health (MCH) epidemiologists in the form of a web-based community where statistical programming code snippets can be shared. The idea is to reduce duplication of work as well as to improve the quality of our work by collaboration and peer review. Those of you familiar with the open source software development philosophy will recognize the parallels.
Let’s say you are a state MCH epidemiologist and you have spent some time analyzing a portion of the National Survey of Children’s Health to inform your state’s policy in a particular area. You’ve done your work in SPSS (or SAS or Stata or whatever) and have a syntax file which formats all of the variables you used in your analysis, as well as another well-commented syntax file which runs the analysis and creates relevant graphics. Until now, these resources would probably be filed away on your hard drive, or at best shared with a colleague or two. Now, you can post these files to this site so other MCH epidemiologists can easily repeat the analysis for their state. It is understood that analyses can’t be completely standardized like this, so each person using the code would have to inspect it carefully for their use. Still, it would be a time-saver.
Anyone choosing to use the files you post implicitly accepts full responsibility to make sure the code meets his or her requirements and agrees that the author(s) are not responsible for any loss(es) resulting from the use of the code. Caveat Utilitor.
This site also provides a Comment function linked to each post. This allows registered users to comment on the code posted by others. Comments might include praise, suggestions for improvements, and even a new and improved version of the original code. Members are expected to be collegial and professional in comments.
My goal is to develop a site where people working in MCH Epidemiology can log in and share statistical code (e.g. SAS, SPSS, Stata, etc.). As a state-based MCH epidemiologist, I’ve noticed that I write code from scratch which often must already exist on the hard drives of my colleagues.
Think of the SAS program written by Milton Kotelchuck as an example of sharing code — it provides a quick and easy way to calculate the Adequacy of Prenatal Care Utilization Index. This not only saves users of the index a lot of work, but it insures consistency in the calculation of the index. Of course, if you use a statistical program other than SAS you still have work to do to translate the code. For example, I translated the APNCU SAS code into SPSS a couple of years ago. Why not share translations like this, as well as other original code? That is the purpose of this site.
Another reason to share code is that it allows us to work together to improve the quality of our programming. Perhaps I made a mistake when I translated the APNCU code mentioned above. If so, this mistake might be caught and corrected by others who adopt and inspect the code for their own use. This site will allow users to collegially comment on code posted by others so that we may collaboratively improve our work. A user might also elect to upload a tweaked version of the code. The end result is an improvement in consistency, quality, and efficiency (time saved).
If you don’t currently take time to insert comments in your code, start now. 
If you would like to contribute code, or just have questions, please send me an email at webmaster@ the domain above (mchepi.com). I write it this way to avoid the address being automatically “harvested” by spammers.
Click HERE to learn how to begin using this site.
-David Laflamme, PhD, MPH
p.s. My intent is that this be a completely free site.