Interdisciplinary Synergy in the Teaching of Applied Community-Based Research Methods

Abstract

The public health human power is one of the most diverse in race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, and sexual orientation. Another area of diversity is the disciplinary background of its workers. Environmental, behavioral, biostatistical, health education, epidemiological, and health policy practitioners converge into the Master of Public Health (MPH) track offerings of our MPH program. The applied community-based participatory research class is a third semester course that is taken only after students have completed the core curriculum. We explain the design and organization of this course, to offer it as a model of interdisciplinary approaches, with experiential, learn-by-doing components that can be replicated and incorporated into public health research methods, as well as to share our own methodological crossovers with mixed methods and theoretical models in our public health research together. Semistructured interviews were applied to elicit feedback from MPH graduates who took the course, and describe the utility of the class. We learned that the MPH graduates found the class useful for short- and medium-term research outcomes.