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Book Review
Community-based Health Research:
Issues and Methods
Daniel S. Blumenthal and Ralph J. DiClemente, editors
Springer Publishing Company, New York, New York
ISBN: 0-8261-2025-3
Pages: 240, Price: U.S. $39.95
Suggested
citation for this article
So many, 11 of 14, contributors to this volume are from the Atlanta area
that I expected this book to speak with a Southern drawl. That it does
not attests to how much this metropolis, growing in kudzu-fashion, has
changed. This element of profound change is also a major motif in the
10 chapters collected by the editors to promote community-based health
research as a mechanism for addressing historic wrongs.
The book is aptly titled and subtitled. Former Surgeon General David
Satcher writes in a concise but illuminating foreword, "Community-based
research is where medicine, public health, and science meet." In
the opening chapter, Daniel Blumenthal and Elleen Yancey herald the arrival
of a "new paradigm" in which community members become full partners
with "culturally competent" researchers. To them, community-based
research is population centered, prevention focused, multidisciplinary,
collaborative, enlightening, and empowering. Caswell Evans follows by
adding "evidence-based" assessments, findings, and guidance
to the mix. In chapter 3, Bill Jenkins, Camara Jones, and Blumenthal address
some of the ethical issues related to community-based research by describing,
analyzing, and drawing lessons from the Tuskegee syphilis study. Culturally
and linguistically diverse voices from the community are heard in chapter
4.
Attention shifts from issues to methods in the last 6 chapters of the
book. In textbook fashion, Nabih R. Asal and Laura A. Beebe distinguish
observational studies from experimental designs in chapter 5 and remind
the reader of the importance of person, place, and time in epidemiologic
investigations. The strengths and weaknesses of the Behavioral Risk Factor
Surveillance System are illustrated by Deborah Holtzman in chapter 6.
Qualitative research methods are described in chapter 7 and applied to
a case study of 45 African-American, female crack-cocaine users in chapter
8. Community intervention trials are introduced and a half dozen are reviewed
in chapter 9. Then the book rather abruptly ends with a short chapter
on cardiovascular risk-reduction community intervention trials.
Instructors looking for a graduate-level textbook may find this recent
addition to the preventive medicine literature incomplete. It fails to
link community-based research with theories of social and cultural change;
the principles and practices of community mobilization; and the identification,
development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally competent interventions.
The editors have produced an adequate introduction to community-based
research issues and methods, but a concluding section that serves to pull
all the components together would put additional copies of this publication
in college bookstores.
William W. Darrow*
*Florida International University, North Miami, Florida, USA
Suggested citation
for this article:
Darrow W. Community-based
health research: issues and methods [book review]. Emerg Infect Dis [serial
on the Internet]. 2005 Feb [date cited]. Available from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no02/04-1033.htm
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