Special Podcast Transcript: PCHP Editorial Transition

Welcome to a special edition of Beyond the Manuscript. In this episode outgoing Editor-in-Chief Eric Bass, incoming Editor-in-Chief Darius Tandon, and Associate Editor Pamela Bohrer Brown discuss the genesis of the Journal, how it has fulfilled its vision for the field of CBPR, and what lies ahead for the Journal and the field.

This, like all Beyond the Manuscript podcasts will be available for download at the Journal's website http://PCHP.press.jhu.edu

Pamela Bohrer Brown:

Darius, when your first edition of PCHP was published in 2007, you and Eric presented a vision for Progress in Community Health Partnerships. In the article, you emphasized eight areas of scholarly activity that can promote research, education, and action in community health partnerships. What's your current vision about the types of scholarly activity that should be emphasized in PCHP?

Darius Tandon:

I think the categories still apply. When we published the first issue and the special article outlining the eight areas, we recognized that there was a diversity of work that needed to be published, reflecting the different types of work that's going on related to community partnerships.

So I certainly think the diversity and the eight types of articles still apply today. And I think that they speak to the different areas that partnerships are working in. In terms of moving forward, I guess there are a couple of thoughts that I have for areas that could be further emphasized.

One is around education and training. I think that there's a lot of effort right now to train investigators and to train community practitioners and community members on doing participatory research. Some of that is due to the investment that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) has made in their CTSA (Clinical and Translational Science Award) programs. So I think as we're seeing a lot of training of researchers and community members, so doing some very good, rigorous, quantitative/qualitative evaluation of this training approach, the impact of the training, would be valuable. I also think that again, partially related to the CTSA programs that are taking place, that there's the ability for the field to do more multi-site projects. I think that one of the challenges is that we often will take a look at a single article and say, "Well, this might be idiosyncratic to a certain context, a certain location."

I think that if we can present findings on training done in multiple sites, methods that were used in multiple sites, I think that we might be able to move the field forward a little bit more.

Pamela:

We've been successful in publishing at least one or two original research articles in every issue. What types of original research would you like to see more of? And what would you like to do to encourage submission of more original research articles? I know Eric has tried to do this over the past year. What are your thoughts?

Eric Bass:

Well, let me take a crack at that one first. Actually, listening to Darius' reply to the first question, I realized that we share a lot of the same opinions about what the Journal needs to do to support the full spectrum of work that's being done, using the methods of CBPR.

Personally, I think it's really important for any peer-reviewed journal to have a strong body of original research. I see the original research as the bedrock of any strong peer-reviewed journal. As the field of CBPR continues to grow, we should expect to see increasing use of stronger study designs and/or new methods for balancing concerns about study validity with concerns about applicability or generalizability of the studies.

New methods should emerge from what seem to be increasingly strong and effective partnerships with communities that are getting more and more sophisticated and empowered in their expectations for the research that can be done to meet their needs.

PCHP has an important role in being a place for publishing the cutting-edge...