I do research on mental health integration into primary care, primarily in safety net settings. Much of my work focuses on Latino populations, as most of my patients are Latino and Spanish-speaking and they face many difficulties in accessing quality mental health care. This class helped to reinforce many of the frameworks and concepts for approaching health disparities research. I found the last week's discussion on the generations of research particularly useful as a way of conceptualizing my research and whereit might fit in to add to current knowledge and where further gap sin knowledge lie. I think it is important to understand the goal of your research and the audience, and framing it within the generations of research can help clarify that and vice versa.
I also felt that the emphasis and classes on measurements were particulalry useful. As we learn to be good researchers, I think it is always important to evaluate the measures your are using and to always question and evaluate whether your variables or measures are adequately capturing what you are trying to measure. I think this is particularly important with race and ethnicity, as it interacts with class and SES in myriad ways, and differently in different contexts (such as Brazil vs US). The classes on these issues, and the conceptual frameworks for organizing research on health disparities were particularly useful.
This class was a good overview of the field, and as others have mentioned, served as a good way to learn how to critically appraise the current literature. Thank you for interesting discussions! One of the most useful things was learning about other people's research interests and how we approach disparities in very different ways!