R. Sam Larson

Nonprofit Management Students: Who They Are and Why They Enroll

Graduate and certificate programs in nonprofit management education are a growing element in the professional preparation of nonprofit managers. At an aggregate level, we know the number and types of programs available for students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in nonprofit management, but we know little about the students who attend these programs and why they chose these programs. To learn more about who these students are and why they choose nonprofit management programs, a survey was conducted in spring and summer 2000 of nonprofit management students enrolled in graduate or certificate programs at six universities across the United States. Results describe the demographic profile of these students, the reasons they sought academic training, and the characteristics they considered important when choosing a nonprofit management education program.

Tensions in Community Health Improvement Initiatives: Communication and Collaboration in a Managed Care Environment

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arrangements into many health care systems. This experimental initiative set out to test the hypothesis that traditional healthcare system animosities and exclusionary practices could be overcome by stakeholder participation in an ongoing, structured, collaborative dialogue about improving access to health services. In the process of collecting data through surveys, interviews, content analysis, and observation, we were struck by the occurrence of several overarching tensions that we perceive to exist in our data. The present article elucidates five such tensions and suggests how third parties such as communication researchers, evaluators, and practitioners can facilitate community health improvement initiatives and better their own data interpretation by acknowledging and understanding these tensions.

LOCAL REINVENTION OF THE CDC HIV PREVENTION COMMUNITY PLANNING INITIATIVE

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in coordination with 65 states, cities, and territories, implemented HIV prevention community planning beginning in 1994. This large scale innovation in public health planning has involved tens of thousands of professionals and community residents. Though a single case study, Michigan provides a strong test of the implementation of this national prevention planning model because of the states decentralized approach to HIV prevention community planning involving several hundred residents. A decentralized approach to community planning promises to maximize participation and the sharing of leadership as well as obstacles to community planning. Here, the CDC Guidance for community planning is contrasted with empirical observation of implementation in Michigan. We conclude that the high expectations for a decentralized approach to HIV prevention community planning can be best achieved when a distinction is drawn between information-seeking tasks and decision-making tasks. We recommend that information-seeking tasks be centrally coordinated, and that decision-making tasks be decentralized, to most fully achieve the potential of HIV prevention community planning.

Assessment of Barriers to Changing Practice as CME Outcomes.

Introduction Continuing medical education (CME) is meant to drive and support improvements in practice. To achieve this goal, CME activities must move beyond simply purveying knowledge, instead helping attendees to contextualize information and to develop strategies for implementing new learning. CME attendees face different barriers to implementing learning, depending on both personal and practice specific contexts. We sought to develop a framework, applicable across multiple CME activities, for categorizing barriers that learners anticipated encountering after CME activities. Methods Building on previous work, qualitative research methods were used to develop an enhanced framework classifying attendee‐perceived barriers to implementing CME learnings in practice. Three thousand one hundred thirty (3130) narrative responses on attendee‐perceived barriers to implementing learnings were collected from 75 Kaiser Permanente Colorado live CME activities for family medicine, internal medicine, pediatric, and OB/GYN clinicians in 2008 and 2009. Results Our CME Learning Transfer Barrier Framework contains 27 discrete barriers in 12 barrier categories (including “none”). The barrier framework was applicable across two years of live CME activities for different clinician target audiences. Discussion Assessing, characterizing, and summarizing barriers to implementing learning during CME activities can provide valuable information to inform subsequent CME interventions, and provide feedback to organizational leaders to inform performance improvement efforts. The framework may be applicable to other CME formats and to CME activities for audiences in different practice settings.

Designing for Diffusion of a Biomedical Intervention

Diffusion is a social process that occurs among people in response to learning about an innovation such as a new evidence-based intervention. Researchers have conceptualized diffusion either at the macro-sociologic level of societal sector or systemand the importance of norms and associations, the communicaive level of relationships and how those patterned linkges affect adoption over time, or the psychological level f how individuals perceive innovations in the form of a odified set of pros and cons. Diffusion is well explained y three factors of adopters’ perception of the innovation n question, adopters’ perception of others’ reactions and he contextual timing and framing of the innovation’s ntroduction to its potential adopters. The present article applies some of what is known about diffusion to the general case of biomedical interventions and specifically pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Designing for diffusion is the taking of strategic steps early in the process of creating and refining an evidence-based intervention to increase its chances of being noticed, positively perceived, accessed, and tried and then adopted, implemented, and sustained in practice. For PrEP, the focus in the current paper is on healthcare providers such as physicians and nurses in primary care units, staff in sexually transmitted disease clinics and community and rural health centers, and staff in allied community-based organizations and pharmacies who serve individuals at high risk for HIV, such as young African-American men who have sex with men. Pre-exposure prophylaxis must first be adopted by healthcare providers before it in turn can be prescribed to and tried by high-risk individuals. Many high-risk indi-

Primary care and public health partnerships for implementing pre-exposure prophylaxis.

published by admin on Fri, 03/14/2014 9:08am Title Primary care and public health partnerships for implementing pre-exposure prophylaxis. Publication Type Journal Article Year of Publication 2013 Authors Norton, WE, R Larson, S, Dearing, JW Journal Am J Prev Med Volume 44 Issue 1 Suppl 2 Pagination S77-9 Date Published 2013 Jan ISSN 1873-2607

Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM: Initial results from an interdisciplinary literature review

Although decades of research have identified effective instructional practices for improving Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, these practices are not widely implemented. Scholars in three fields are interested in promoting these practices and have engaged in research on pedagogical change: Disciplinary‐based STEM Education Researchers, Faculty Development Researchers, and Higher Education Researchers. There is little interaction between the fields and efforts in all areas have met with only modest success. In this paper we present an initial examination of 130 randomly chosen articles from a set of 295 we identified as addressing efforts to promote change in the instructional practices of STEM faculty. We identify four core change strategies and note that change strategies differ by fields. Articles in all fields frequently do not provide enough evidence to convincingly argue for the success of the change strategy studied and have few connections to theoretical or empiric...

PREPARING STUDENTS FOR EARLY WORK CONFLICTS

To improve college students’ skills in resolving workplace conflict, the authors studied the types of workplace conflicts that students encounter with peers or supervisors in part-time or seasonal work and with whom they discuss these conflicts. The authors found that most students report conflicts that are process or relational in nature, with few students reporting task-oriented conflict. Nearly all students report discussing the conflict with third parties—individuals outside the organization and/or the conflict—and nearly all students find these discussions helpful in resolving or working through the conflict. Based on their literature review and research, the authors developed scenarios to help students “read” and resolve workplace conflicts. The scenarios use conversations with people outside the conflict—third-party discussions—to help students respond appropriately to the conflict.

Private foundation funding of applied communication research

Communication researchers increasingly have a primed and attentive audience in private foundations. Yet most foundations are quite dissimilar to the types of organizations that we as communication scholars know and understand. Here we discuss private foundation funding for applied communication research, including how funding priorities are set, and how potential grantees may position themselves for foundation funds. In doing so, we focus on five norms that characterize American private foundations and their program staff: (1) social betterment, (2) organizational interdependency, (3) personal commitment, (4) future orientation, and (5) external generalizability. How well you and your proposal match up with these norms will affect your success with private foundations.