Consolidating the Academic End of a Community-Based Participatory Research Venture to Address Health Disparities.

Although there is strong support for community engagement and community-based participatory research (CBPR) from public health entities, medical organizations, and major grant-funding institutions, such endeavors often face challenges within academic institutions. Fostering the interest, skills, and partnerships to undertake participatory research projects and truly impact the community requires an interdisciplinary team with the competencies and values to engage in this type of research. Discussed in this article is how a CBPR-focused team evolved at a southern university, with emphasis on the activities that supported group identity, contributed to its evolution, and positioned the group to speak with authority in promoting CBPR as a tool for addressing health disparities.

Investigating health disparities through community-based participatory research: lessons learned from a process evaluation.

This article describes one university's efforts to partner with a local agency (the "Coalition") within a disadvantaged, predominantly African American neighborhood, to assist them with studying their community's health disparities and health care access. The final, mutually agreed-upon plan used a community-based participatory research approach, wherein university researchers prepared neighborhood volunteers and Coalition members to conduct face-to-face interviews with residents about their health and health care access. Subsequently, the Coalition surveyed 138 residents, and the agency now possesses extensive data about the nature and extent of health problems in their community. Lessons learned from these experiences are offered.

Speech-language pathologists' informal learning in healthcare settings: behaviours and motivations.

The current research sought to identify the types of informal learning behaviours speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in healthcare settings engage in as well as SLPs' motivations for engaging in informal learning. Twenty-four American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)-certified SLPs participated in this qualitative study. Data collection consisted of computer-mediated interviews, online journaling, and a virtual focus group. These textual data were coded and collapsed into themes. All participant SLPs reported that they learned through collaboration (inter- and intra-disciplinary), worked with patients to learn through trial-and-error, and consulted non-peer-reviewed material on the internet as well as peer-reviewed research in order to learn informally in the workplace. Eighteen of the 24 participants reported being motivated to learn at work to meet a patient's need to meet therapy goals. Five of the 24 participants reported meeting their own personal learning needs was a motivating factor and 10 of the 24 participants reported learning informally to meet the needs of the healthcare organization/SLP profession. Results were compared to past research on SLPs' information retrieval behaviours. It was concluded that SLPs acknowledge their personal work-related gaps in knowledge and skills and actively seek to develop their knowledge and skill base through informal means.

A multisite description of juvenile drug courts: program models and during-program outcomes.

Like adult drug courts, juvenile drug courts have proliferated at a rapid rate during the past 15 years, but comparatively little research has been conducted on them. Although a few studies indicate that these programs appear to show promise as an intervention, almost nothing has been published using systematic and empirical methods to provide a description and specific examples of how these programs are structured and implemented. The purpose of the current study, therefore, is to summarize and integrate findings from systematic process evaluations of three juvenile drug courts. Similarities and differences in the structure and design of the programs are noted and findings regarding the program model for each juvenile drug court, including target population, therapeutic activities, and initial and long-term goals are presented. During-program outcome data also are presented, and findings are reported as a "snapshot" of what happened during one calendar year in the operation of each program.