An analysis of doctoral programs of health education

American Journal of Health Studies, Spring, 2004 by Stephen J. Notaro, Thomas W. O'Rourke, James M. Eddy

EXTERNAL FUNDING (18.1%)

External funding was determined by the approximate total dollar value (direct and indirect costs) of health education grants and contracts where the faculty member served only as a principal investigator or co-principal investigator (not as a subcontractor), for the five year period January 1993 through December 1997, that contributed directly to the following; (a) Faculty and graduate student health education research, (b) Health education community intervention activities or demonstration projects, (c) Health education innovations, training, continuing education and related activities, (d) Other (respondents were asked to explain). If one grant/contract contributed to more than one category, the funds were to be either divided or allocated to the most related category. Funds were not to be double counted. Grants and contracts whose primary purpose was non-health education related were not included.

As indicated in Table 1, a wide range (from a high value of $20,500,000 to a low value of $18,000) of external funding was noted. The top five ranked programs all reported more than 10 million dollars funding while the lowest six programs reported less than $500,000 in external funding. The wide variation was noted in measures of central tendency with the mean ($5,042,076) being higher than the median ($3,248,074) due to the presence of several programs that received substantially more funds than many of the other programs.

ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY PROGRAM FACULTY(17.3%)

Articles published were collected from the 81 journals identified by Laflin et.al., (1999). The numbers of articles published were based on the sum of the five faculty members provided by each program that were retrievable from the 81 journals by the use of automated library indexes. Books were not used for several reasons. Books are not subject to peer review to the same extent as peer reviewed articles. However, to assess the effect of books on rankings, a separate analysis was conducted correlating academic publishing productivity of articles alone to articles and books combined. The variables were nearly perfectly correlated (.98) indicating excluding books from the analysis would not significantly effect the rankings. The indexes used were ERIC, MEDLINE, Psych Info, and Web of Science.

Table 1 evidences a wide range in articles published with a maximum number of 32 and a minimum number of one article. The top six programs published 20 or more articles with two exceeding 30 articles. The bottom 12 programs published fewer than 10 articles. The mean number of articles published by the programs was 13.0. While good overall faculty performance is dearly one explanation of the higher producing programs, other explanations could be considered. First, the presence of a "star" faculty with numerous publications in a program may give the appearance of total program activity that is in actuality limited to one individual. Second, some faculty publish in more popular areas of social concern (such as the effects of alcohol and smoking). The higher number of publications may, in this case, more reflect the popularity of the topic rather than its scholarly content. Also, programs with more publications may simply have more faculty. Although this study limited the number of faculty to five from each program, the larger programs may have more faculty to handle administrative duties resulting in faculty from large programs having more time to devote to research. Finally, the number of publications may also reflect the mission of the program in that research institutions would be expected to have more publications while programs with a teaching focus would more likely have fewer publications.