Searching for Racial Health Equity in Schools of Public Health

Link to full text dissertation.

Dissertation Abstract: A systematic assessment of what is taught and what is learned in academic public health is needed to facilitate racism consciousness among the rising generation of public health professionals.

I study how institutions enable or constrain access to knowledge in public health through three aims:

  1. to determine what knowledge is transmitted to students regarding racial health equity through accreditation self-study reports and syllabi;

  2. to classify the knowledge students produce in abstracts from public health theses and dissertations;

  3. to categorize and contextualize how students discuss racism in theses and dissertations on racial health equity.

Data for this sequential explanatory mixed methods study comes from schools of public health (n=34 accreditation self-study reports, n=87 course syllabi) and public health theses and dissertation abstracts (n=13,842) published in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Using natural language processing techniques and critical race discourse analysis, I estimate the distributions of keywords and contextualize whether and how students discuss racism as a determinant of health. This three-paper dissertation can inform approaches to teaching about equity in health professions education.

Aim 1: What is taught?

Paper 1 reflects my endeavor to make visible what schools of public health teach about the structural determinants of health. I use mixed methods to determine what knowledge is transmitted from schools of public health to students via course syllabi. Expanding on my pilot assessment of 176 course syllabi at one school of public health, Paper 1 broadens the sample to 34 schools of public health while targeting specific courses. I reviewed the reaccreditation self-study report from each school to identify 87 courses that map to the foundational knowledge and competence requirements related to structural determinants of health.

Aim 2: What is learned?

In Paper 2, I classify students’ knowledge by modeling topics in abstracts for public health theses and dissertations. As a machine learning approach, topic models predict how likely a document reflects a set of topics based on word counts and context. Seeded topic models use word lists to guide these groupings. I detected commonly used multiword expressions based on statistically significant cooccurrence patterns and compiled word lists on explicit theories (e.g., “individual health behavior”) and racial groups (e.g., “African American”). I generated topic models and assessed each model’s performance on a validation set.

Aim 3: What is learned about racial health equity?

For Paper 3, I qualitatively examine students’ use of racism in 25 randomly selected full-text theses and dissertations from Paper 2. Through descriptive coding, I organize where in the thesis “racism” is mentioned (e.g., background, measures). Through thematic coding, I frame how racism is theorized, measured, and discussed. Then, I apply a racism narrative typology to determine the extent to which each document advances anti-racist actions (e.g., names, describes, dismantles). Lastly, I use metadata (e.g., institution type, student’s department) to identify trends within this racism subset.

AERA Dissertation Travel Award

I am among the 15 awardees in the final stages of dissertation studies selected for AERA’s 2023-2024 Minority Dissertation Fellowship in Education Research Program.

Travel awardees receive funds to attend the AERA Annual Meeting. All awardees will present their work in an invited poster session during the 2024 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where they will meet with the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Selection Committee and other senior scholars as part of a mentoring and career development workshop.

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AERA Council established the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program in Education Research in 1991 to support outstanding graduate students as they develop their research and begin their careers. AERA and its leadership are committed to providing a program of capacity-building and training opportunities for scholars from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in education research.

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This is a highly competitive program that funds the strongest research on topics across education, school and schooling processes, and student experiences. The selection committee seeks proposals to bring grounded, insightful, and informed perspectives to the field.

Dissertation Committee

  • Gilbert C. Gee, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. His research focuses on racism and other social determinants of health inequities among racial/ethnic and immigrant communities. Dr. Gee shared the Delta Omega Award for Innovative Public Health Curriculum with student leaders from the CHS Grads for Racial Justice.

  • Dr. Alina Dorian is the Associate Dean for Public Health Practice as well as an Associate Professor in the Community Health Sciences (CHS) Department. She has held several key positons at UCLA including Associate Director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters and Associate Director for the MPH for Health Professionals Program.

  • Daniel Solórzano is a Professor of Social Science and Comparative Education, and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies in Education at UCLA. His teaching and research interests include critical race theory in education; racial microaggressions; racial microaffirmations; and critical race spatial analysis. In 2020, Solórzano was elected to the National Academy of Education.

  • Courtney S. Thomas Tobin, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health with a joint appointment in the UCLA African American Studies Department. Drawing on her training in medical sociology, Dr. Thomas Tobin uses mixed-method, transdisciplinary approaches to identify sources of psychosocial risk and resilience that contribute to gender and socioeconomic health disparities among African Americans.