This track will provide graduate students skills to build partnerships and active participation to address critical health issues in communities throughout the world. It provides unique social science skills to integrate community members, local stakeholders, elected officials, and researchers in the design, implementation, interpretation of community-based participatory studies as well as uses of research and eveluation results to develop integrated policies to improve the wellbeing of community members. Community-based participatory research is a methodology that has been widely endorsed by major global health players, including the NIH's Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. Substitute courses may be permitted for some coursework that includes tailored research and independent study courses with faculty approval.
Those students who complete this track will have the professional degree necessary for placement in community health research projects which address questions of delivering biomedical care to culturally distinctive populations and may or may not address questions of complementary and alternative health care. Their skills in both structured and open-ended interviewing and analysis of the resultant data are in high demand in the United States and around the world. Community-based participatory research skills are particularly prized by propspective employers. No other program in South Florida provides this training currently.
Click here to view the curriculum for this track.
