title: Case study in designing a research fundamentals curriculum for community health workers: a university-community clinic collaboration.
abstract: Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly incorporated into research teams. Training them in research methodology and ethics, while relating these themes to a community's characteristics, may help to better integrate these health promotion personnel into research teams. An interactive training course on research fundamentals for CHWs was designed and implemented jointly by a community agency serving a primarily Latino, rural population and an academic health center. A focus group of community members and input from community leaders comprised a community-based participatory research model to create three 3-hour interactive training sessions. The resulting curriculum was interactive and successfully stimulated dialogue between trainees and academic researchers. By choosing course activities that elicited community-specific responses into each session's discussion, researchers learned about the community as much as the training course educated CHWs about research. The approach is readily adaptable, making it useful to other communities where CHWs are part of the health system.
authors.affiliation: 1University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Jill
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dumbauld
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kalichman
authors.forename: Yvonne
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bell
authors.forename: Cynthia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dagnino
authors.forename: Howard L
authors.initials: HL
authors.lastname: Taras
mesh_terms: D003150:Community Health Workers / Q000193:education*; D055812:Community-Based Participatory Research; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D018794:Problem-Based Learning; D012424:Rural Population; D013192:Staff Development / Q000458:organization & administration; D014495:Universities
keywords: college/community partnerships; community organization; community-based participatory research; health promotion; health research; partnerships/coalitions; training; university/college health; workforce development