Do you wish to contribute to breaking cycles of ill-health in disadvantaged populations? And explore co-occurrence of diseases, such as substance abuse, infectious and chronic disease, and the relation with social factors (disparities)?
Are you disappointed in the poor effectiveness of interventions for combined social and medical problems? Then this syndemics course might provide you with some answers. In medicine, diseases are generally approached as distinct entities, in isolation from other diseases ánd the social contexts in which the disease occurs. However, in disadvantaged populations accumulations of risk factors intertwine with complex social problems leading to excessive burdens of disease and interventions with poor effectiveness. For that reason, alternative approaches are needed that do not separate diseases from the contexts of inequality and health disparity in which they develop. The simultaneous presence of more than one disease is not treated as co-morbidity; a syndemic approach pays attention to the forces that tie afflictions together. This course will learn you about the concept of syndemcs and how to explore these combined medical and social problems. It will cover different research methods (quantitative, qualitative and mixed-method research) that can be used in studying syndemics.
JS
This is a very good course for understanding qualitative and quantitative research. It's worth the time and effort.
AS
Informative, just the right pace and the right mix of lectures and tasks. I have learned very useful things for my practice.
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Informative, just the right pace and the right mix of lectures and tasks. I have learned very useful things for my practice.
This is a very good course for understanding qualitative and quantitative research. It's worth the time and effort.
Content was overall decently organized. The best part is how clear they make the definitions of different aspect of a syndemic. The analytical framework they present is clear if you have a background in epidemiology or biostatistics.
On the other hand, the quantitive analytical framework is a little bit out of date. Recently Singer published an article condemning the use of sum scores precisely because they do NOT capture the interactive nature of disease interactions in syndemics. Furthermore, the qualitative lectures were somewhat patronizing, focusing more on the intrigue of these methods to the person conducting the study instead of the unique value these methods provide. The mixed methods section does a better job of presenting how qualitative methods dovetail with quantitative methods to really capture the truth of a syndemic in a way that neither can really do alone. Finally, the exams/quizzes are riddled with bugs/typos/etc. Many of the questions are literally unsolvable using the numbers they provided, or the link to an article you need to answer the question is broken, or it says you need didn't select all the correct answers where you obviously did. For example, the final exam question which asks what the 2 d's stand for in VIDDA asks for more than 2 answers to be selected. That makes no sense. It's depression and diabetes and the other answers don't cover those.
All things considered this course is a fine introduction to syndemics but could really do with cleaning up the exams, updating the analytical framework, and potentially getting a different set of lectures for the qualitative portion.