2012-2013 Academic Catalog

May 11, 2024

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

IDCE 30282 - Community Based Health Research

This course will provide students with a background in community health as well as experience in conducting research in the field. A trans-disciplinary, team-taught course, it will draw on and integrate the theoretical and methodological perspectives of fields including medical anthropology, GIS, environmental health, and environmental and social epidemiology. As part of a global health initiative within IDCE, it will build on methods and health courses across the department that use both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Chronic disease will be the focus of the course. Teams of students will partner with a community organization or local agency and jointly identify a research question related to chronic diseases to pursue. During the first module, students will work in teams to design a study, using qualitative or quantitative approaches or mixed methods. Students will develop a literature review to situate their work in the appropriate research literature. Each group will present their study to the class and project partners and also critique the study designs of the other project groups. Preliminary assignments will include a research design, critiques of the research design and methods of recent journal articles, data collection, data analysis, and reporting on results. Overall, the project will give students experience in identifying a community health problem and designing a way to study it.