Department of Health Behavior (GRAD)

This course is designed to provide a framework for students to reflect on their existing public service and community engagement experiences, critically examine important issue areas, build skills and consider how what they are learning may inform their career paths. Students will participate in weekly group lecture and recitation sessions as well as completing at least 30 hours of work in partnership with a community organization.

Students will 1) explore how health inequities appear in different populations; 2) examine historical and relevant events to unpack how these inequities came to be; and 3) gain an overview of self-reflective and community engagement strategies used by health behavior practitioners and researchers to ethically partner with others to identify and address health inequities.

This course introduces fundamental terminology, frameworks, problems, and solutions in global health. We will explore the historical and modern-day influences that have shaped the systems, issues, actors, and priorities of global health today. This course will expose students to: critical global health challenges; leaders across diverse sectors who are working to develop innovative solutions, policies, and programs to address these challenges; and roles that students can play to contribute to improving global health.

Engaging communities to identify their strengths, needs and priorities and determine action steps to address them is at the core of public health practice. Conducting a health assessment with communities is an essential public health function required in local and global contexts. This class will examine approaches to the assessment process, compare qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, and examine strategies for ensuring effective and equitable community engagement throughout the assessment process.

This course will provide exposure to interventions designed to address determinants of health issues across all levels of the social ecological framework. Students will think critically about the purpose, design, and success of public health interventions. Throughout the course, students will learn the relevant terminology, frameworks, and processes to design, adapt, implement, and evaluate interventions in health behavior.

This experiential service-learning course will focus on interpersonal leadership theories, skill development, and application, with an in-depth emphasis on leadership as a behavior (i.e., self in relation to others). Students in this course serve as alternative break leaders through the APPLES Service-Learning Program. Leadership practices learned in this course will be directly applied to their experience as a break leader and to long-term leadership growth and development.

This course will explore issues, theories, and experiences relevant to social action, coalition building, and social change. The content of this course will be examined by confronting the possibilities and limitations of service and service-learning as it relates to APPLES Alternative Spring Break experiences.

In this course students learn about and experience the process of awarding grants to local agencies. In addition to participating in the grant-making process, students learn about the nonprofit sector and the philosophy and practice of philanthropy through readings, class exercises, and guest speakers.

This course examines unintentional injuries from a public health perspective. The course covers core concepts in injury prevention and control, including the epidemiology of unintentional injury, prevention strategies, behavioral models, child and adolescent injury, messaging framing, the Haddon matrix, and injury surveillance.

This course covers core concepts in violence prevention and control, including the epidemiology of violence, prevention strategies for inter-personal and intra-personal violence, behavioral models that describe power structures that reinforce personal and societal factors affecting self-harm and violence towards others, and violence directed towards children and adolescents.

This interprofessional service-learning course prepares students to work in teams alongside community members to quickly, efficiently, and effectively develop and test innovative prototypes (i.e. preliminary versions of a solution) to help solve pressing and complex challenges. Using a participatory rapid prototyping approach, this course will make the innovation and problem-solving processes more accessible by equipping students with the skills to frame testable ideas, define measures, build prototypes, and execute experiments. Permission of instructor required to enroll.

Special topics in health behavior. An experimental course designed for faculty who wish to offer a new course. Content will vary from semester to semester.

This is a required course for masters' students in the EQUITY concentration. The course will expose students to the broad context through which public health practitioners and researchers understand and address public health issues regarding health equity, social justice and human rights. This course will provide students with an overview of the field, as well as an introduction to concepts and topics that are relevant across the MPH curriculum.

This course will take a holistic approach to understanding and achieving health equities. We will explore how inequities appear in different populations; examine historical and relevant events to unpack how these inequities came to be; and identify strategies to intervene to reduce or eliminate these inequities. We will identify and develop a model to be utilized as a tool when addressing public health related issues.

This seminar course explores health challenges faced by LGBT populations. Discussions will span a variety of health behaviors and outcomes, determinants of health, developmental stages, identities, and settings. Students will be able to identify conceptual frameworks and considerations relevant in LGBT health research and practice.

Students are introduced to adult learning principles, effective training methods, course design and evaluation for international audiences and settings, and characteristics of culturally-competent trainers. Students work in teams to: design a course and activity; facilitate the activity; and provide and incorporate feedback to foster peer sharing and learning.

This course is designed to introduce students to the recent drivers of homelessness, the intersection between built environment and structural factors that impact someone's path into or out of homelessness, the policy landscape situating housing and homeless service provision, and the interventions that are shaping healthcare delivery for the most marginalized.

The nature and delineation of participatory action research and its relevance to concepts, principles, and practices of community empowerment. Students learn methods (such as photovoice) through learning projects.

Course provides foundation and skills to understand and improve decision making that affects people's health. It teaches theoretical basis and evidence-based applications of health-related decision making.

This course provides students with the tools to select methods, collect and analyze data, and evaluate programs, all using an equity lens. We discuss critical approaches to quantitative and qualitative methods, how to develop equity-centering and inclusive measurements, and how to use community-based approaches to data collection and analysis.

This course critically examines the history of public health as a mechanism for understanding current issues in public health. Using critical theory, students will analyze a variety of topics through a historical lens, critiquing the institutions, power dynamics, ideologies, practices, and consequences of various public health efforts, particularly as they relate to engaging with communities. Students should have at least one year of public health coursework.

Topics covered include the epidemiology of health problems, developmental issues, health services, and psychosocial influences on adolescent problem behaviors. Course materials are useful for research generation and practical application. Three seminar hours per week.

This course will provide an overview of social and behavioral science theories and frameworks that are currently used to: 1) understand health related behaviors; and 2) guide development of interventions and policies designed to prevent, reduce or eliminate major public health problems. We will use an ecological framework to examine theories at multiple levels of the social ecology, focusing on applications that will impact health at the population level.

This course will introduce some of the foundational thinking that has given rise to intersectionality as a framework for understanding the intersection of multiple marginalized populations in health equity. The course will also survey methods and measurement approaches in intersectionality research. The latter part of the course will focus on applications of intersectionality research in public health, including implementation science and public policy.

Individually designed and mentored research practicum for enhancing knowledge and skills in research through work on a research project.

Mentored research practicum in writing a publishable manuscript.

Capstone (HBEH 746/992) is a year-long, community-led, group-based, mentored service-learning course that gives students an opportunity to apply HB MPH knowledge and skills to community-identified public health projects in partnership with local organizations. As the culminating experience of the HB MPH program, the products produced for this course serve as a substitute to The Graduate School's master's thesis requirement.

This course will train an interdisciplinary group of graduate students to apply the mindsets, methods, and process associated with design thinking (i.e. human-centered design) to solve real world problems. Design thinking is a creative problem solving process that prioritizes ethnographic market research, convergent and divergent thinking, as well as rapid prototyping. Students will collaborate with community members to design solutions (products, services, etc.) that are desirable, feasible, and viable.

This special topics seminar examines the impact and potential of mobile health interventions and apps for health behavior change. The overall course objective is to understand state of the science and future potential to leverage mobile phones and wearable technologies in innovative and powerful behavior change interventions to improve health. The course considers adaptation of eHealth interventions for mobile delivery, unique opportunities with mHealth, data collection via mobile devices and sensors, and using the data.

This course reviews quantitative methods in health behavior research, focusing on validity of conclusions drawn from observational and evaluation studies. The goal is to help public health practitioners be savvy consumers of published research studies and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of planned programs. Permission of the instructor required for non-majors.

This course is a critical examination and application of the concepts and methodologies necessary for effectively selecting, adapting, implementing, and evaluating evidence-based public health interventions. Restricted to Health Behavior MPH Concentration Students, others must seek permission of instructor.

Approaches to designing qualitative research studies for the development and evaluation of public health programs. Emphasis is on the practice of collecting and analyzing data from individual interviews, focus group discussions, and observations. All students in the course are required to have completed CITI Human Subjects Training. Information on completing the training can be found at the CITI website: http://www.citiprogram.org/default.asp?language=english.

This course provides advanced graduate students in public health and related fields the opportunity to explore different analytic approaches and techniques and develop analysis and writing skills. Students will apply methods they learn to analyze, interpret and write-up the results of their own qualitative research.

Course will survey social support in health, including the nature and key processes of social support, cultural influences in different countries, and approaches to promoting peer support in health promotion around the world. Term assignment will entail planning a peer support program or research project of the student's choice.

Permission of the instructor for non-majors. Fundamentals of quantitative research in health behavior, including conceptualization of research questions and hypotheses, sampling, and experimental and observational research designs.

Fundamentals of statistical inference and estimation and hypothesis testing for linear models (ANOVA, ANCOVA, regression analysis) with continuous and categorical outcome data. Applications with health behavior data. Permission of the instructor for non-majors.

This course prepares students to conduct regression with non-continuous outcomes and analyze nested or longitudinal data.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a foundational theoretical knowledge of psychological assessment and a skills-oriented understanding of common qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques for scale construction. A secondary course objective is to expose students to structural latent variable models and related advanced latent variable modeling techniques relevant to scale development. This course is intended for doctoral students. Previously offered as HBEH 852.

An interdisciplinary overview of cancer prevention and control. Emphasis on projects and activities from perspectives of epidemiology, health behavior and education, and health policy and management. Appropriate research design and methodologies are covered.

This course examines the social, economic, cultural, organizational, and institutional factors that impact public and population health in the US. These factors include population characteristics (social class, age, gender, cultural background, race, ethnicity), individual beliefs and behaviors, and socio-political systems and practices that affect public health problems and policies. Although the course focuses on the United States, many of the same factors affect health and longevity across population subgroups in other countries.

Designed to provide practical tools that can be used in real world settings, this course will examine methods to plan health behavior interventions and determine if and how a particular health-related program works. Several major types of evaluation will be covered, with emphasis on process and impact evaluation. Restricted to Health Behavior MPH Concentration Students.

This course introduces skills needed to effectively assess and influence a four phase policy process: 1) Defining the problem toward structural solutions; 2) Developing a policy or structural solution by using systems thinking and policy agenda windows and applying policy analysis tools to optimize the solution; 3) Using advocacy strategies to influence the solution toward enactment; and 4) Clarifying the implementation components that need to be in place and the political games that ensue.

This course introduces students to key concepts in mixed methods analysis for global health. You will learn how to plan and implement a mixed methods project using existing data. You will develop skills around qualitative data management, coding, and analysis. Using a sequential, mixed methods design you will use qualitative insights to design a quantitative hypothesis. Qualitative and quantitative findings will be combined and applied to a current global health policy or practice. Restricted to Global Health MPH students.

Professional Development is part of the required training sequence for second year MPH students in the Global Health concentration.

Implementation science aims to improve health through the translation of evidence-based intervention into routine care. This course will provide an overview of the foundational skills of implementation science in global health including tailoring to the local context, systematic approaches to identifying implementation barriers and selecting appropriate implementation strategies, and using rigorous study designs to evaluate implementation outcomes. Restricted to students enrolled in the Global Health MPH Concentration.

This course prepares students to contribute as members of an interdisciplinary team to protect and promote workers' health. Students will learn that work is a social determinant of health and explore the context in which worker health protection/promotion practitioners work. Students will be able to summarize key regulations and policies that impact work and worker health.

Required course for the graduate certificate in Total Worker Health. Students in this course will develop skills for deploying a comprehensive, multi-level assessment of worker and workplace health. Students will draw on the evidence base to articulate a plan for engaging employees in assessments; describe how to conduct individual worker assessments ethically and legally; conduct several types of organizational assessment; summarize administrative data (such as use of sick leave in the worksite) and practice communicating.

Required course for the graduate certificate in Total Worker Health. Students in this course will apply the Comprehensive Planning-Implementation-Evaluation Framework to recommend a Total Worker Health intervention to address the needs of a specific group of workers. They will learn to use multiple data sources to identify a priority worker health/safety issue; identify and/or adapt worker-health interventions from the literature; and write an implementation and evaluation plan for their Total Worker Health intervention.

Racialization, or the process of race making in time and place, is a concept that is foundational to public health practice and research. This course will use historical and sociological perspectives to learn about the construction of ethnoracial groups across the Americas, how racialization is defined in law, manifested in geography, medicine, and occupation. We will also apply the racialization framework to the critique racialized data in public health.

Experimental course to be offered by faculty to determine the need and demand for the subject. Topics will be chosen by faculty based on current public health issues.

Permission of the instructor for non-majors. Doctoral seminar on application of theory and empirical evidence to intervention development, evaluation paradigms, and methods of process and outcome evaluations.

Focus is on professional development competencies needed for doctoral training and career advancement. Emphasis is on topics relevant to students early in training.

Focus is on professional development competencies needed for doctoral training and career advancement. Emphasis is on topics relevant to students nearing the dissertation phase and training completion.

A critical examination of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical bases of public health and health education, health transitions, globalization, and issues around social justice. Restricted to doctoral students majoring or minoring in Health Behavior.

A critical examination of the social determinants of health, health disparities, principles of individual and collective behavior and behavior change, and the role of health behavior in emerging public health issues. Restricted to doctoral students majoring or minoring in Health Behavior.

Permission required for non-majors. Interdisciplinary overview of communication theory and research and critical analysis of applications of theory to interventions using communication for health. Three hours per week.

Individually designed and mentored practicum for gaining and strengthening skills in research.

Individually designed and mentored practicum for gaining and strengthening skills in teaching, research, or another area relevant to professional goals.

This seminar is designed to refine a wide range of research skills in health behavior by using data collected by others. Three seminar hours per week.

Restricted to doctoral students in department. Integration and application of detailed components of research methods to preparation and writing of a research grant proposal. Introduction to proposal submission and review process for various funding agencies.

Global fundamentals, characteristics, public health impacts, prevention, and management of mental health and mental illness. Master's and doctoral students, fellows, and upper-level undergraduates.

An independent course designed for study areas of natural or planned change; personal and nonpersonal methods, in health related fields. To be arranged with faculty in each case.

Required preparation, to be arranged with the faculty in each case. An independent course of study designed for students who wish to pursue advanced studies in program design and evaluation. Repeatable within degree (for six hours).

An independent course of study for students who wish to pursue studies in social class and variations in planned change. To be arranged with faculty in each case. Fall, spring, and summer.

For doctoral students who wish to pursue an independent study or research in a selected area. Student will work with a faculty member in designing the study.

This course is designed to introduce medical students and other health professionals to the underlying philosophies, practitioners, techniques, and evidence of efficacy of alternative therapeutics currently in use in the United States, including chiropractic, dietary, mind-body, acupuncture, homeopathy, and healing.

Capstone is a year-long, group-based, mentored, service-learning course. Over the course of two semesters, each team works with a partner organization and its stakeholders to produce a set of deliverables. Capstone sessions provide opportunities for students to prepare for, reflect upon, cross-share about, and present their Capstone projects. Majors only.