Global Health Research in Practice
How to Ask Good Questions, Design Better Studies, and Do Research That Matters
Preface
If research methods feels like the course you have to survive rather than the one that might change how you think, I get it. Most of us learned methods as a collection of procedures divorced from the messy reality of actually doing research—especially research in settings where the power goes out, the sampling frame is fiction, and your carefully validated instrument makes no cultural sense.
This book exists because I wanted to teach it differently.
In 2016, the director of our new undergraduate major in global health asked me to teach the core research methods course. I said yes, then immediately realized I had a problem: none of the textbooks on the market aligned with what I wanted students to learn. They treated methods as universal procedures rather than context-dependent choices. They drew examples from Boston and Baltimore, not Bamako and Bangalore. They taught the mechanics of research without the judgment calls that make or break a study in the field.
So I started writing my own materials. Lecture notes became chapters. Chapters accumulated into a book. And because I wanted to practice what I preach about open science, I published it online where anyone could read it—and kept revising as I learned what worked in the classroom and what didn’t.
Who This Book Is For
I wrote this for students and early-career researchers who want to do rigorous, ethical research that actually matters. Maybe you’re a student designing your first study. Maybe you’re a clinician who wants to evaluate a program. Maybe you’re a policy analyst who needs to understand the evidence base. Whoever you are, if you care about global health and want to contribute meaningfully, this book is for you.
How to Use This Book
You don’t have to read this book cover to cover. Each chapter stands on its own, so feel free to jump to whatever you need. Working on a grant proposal? Start with the chapter on grant writing. Confused about quasi-experimental designs? Go there. Trying to figure out how to measure something that seems unmeasurable? The measurement chapter has you covered.
That said, if you’re new to research, I’d recommend starting with Part 1. The chapters on asking good questions and searching the literature will save you countless hours of spinning your wheels later.
Acknowledgments
If you find something you like in this book, I can probably trace its origin to one of the many people who helped me pull it all together. I want to thank them for this good work and absolve them from responsibility for any errors.
I’ll start with my students. A big thank you to my graduate student teaching assistants who reviewed early drafts, including Kaitlin Saxton, Kathleen Perry, Olivia Fletcher, and Jenae Logan, as well as students in my courses who provided feedback—anonymously or not (Chantel Abdulai, Alisa Adhikari, Jacob Ahn, Angel, Emine Arcasoy, Pranav Athimuthu, Lori Babb, Theiija Bala, Autumn Barnes, Anika Birewar, Yasmin Byott, Isabella Caracta, Maggie Chang, Shivangi Choudhary, Dalia, Surakshya Dhakal, Jack Dougherty, Evan Dragich, Kiara Ekeigwe, Nathan Ellermeier, Priyanka Fernandes, Ruth Fetaw, Aidan Floyd, Eliza Foley, Gabriel, Gabryel Garcia-Sampson, Francine Georgopoulos, Uma M. Govindswamy, Azana Green, Karly Gregory, Sandy Hatoum, Lukas Heidegger, Rithika Hossain, Shannon Houser, Michelle Huang, Zoe Hughes, Sophia Jackman, Xiaomei Jin, Sawyer Jonker, Morgan Kempf, Michaela Kotarba, Kyla Marie Kurian, Ulia L, Anna Lehmann, Payton Little, Chandra Mackey, Amy Maddess, Mahgul, Kelly Marsh, Fatima Massare, Obale Armstrong Mbi, Morgan McKinney, Molly Mendoza, Rob Morhard, Mia Murphy, Sarah Muzzy, Judith Mwobobia, Dorothy Nam, Don Nguyen, Brianda Barrera Olvera, Isaiah Omondi, Alyssia Parsons, Paula, Alena Pauley, Meghan Peel, Maggie Pickard, PJ, Nikki Prattipati, Kaitlin Quick, Zhuldyz Rakhatova, Ashna Ram, Justin Rasmussen, Ashley Rea, Rukmamaya, Carrie Sample, Ameya Sanyal, Laya Sathyan, Peyton Schafer, Brooke Schmidt, Christina Schmidt, Elizabeth Shulman, Amber Smith, Stephanie Stan, Eleanor Strand, Bisma Suleman, Kelsey Sumner, Jande Thomas, Alvan Ukachukwu, Beverly Anne Villar-Dominguez, Vivien Wambugu, Cindy Wang, Anisha Watwe, Richard Wu, Yewei Xie, Qian Yudong, Ziqi Zhang, Hana Zwick).
Next I’d like to thank my colleagues at Duke who provided a lot of support. Duke librarians Megan Von Isenburg and Hannah Rozear for setting me straight on literature searches. Biostatistican Liz Turner for fielding lots of technical questions. Gavin Yamey for helping me understand what we do and don’t know about funding for global health research.
On the institutional side, I’m grateful to the Learning Innovations team (formerly known as) for coming on this journey with me, including Andrea Novicki, Heather Hans, William Williamson, Ben Richardson, Michael Blair, and Quentin Ruiz-Esparza. Thanks as well to Mary Story and Sarah Martin for supporting me from within the Duke Global Health Institute, and to Duke OIT staff, including Zach Hill, Jeremy Hopkins, and Richard Biever, who helped me to get domains and servers working, despite my efforts to thwart their progress.
I used R and numerous tools from RStudio to create this book and course materials. I’m very thankful for their support to educators like me. The same goes for members of the open source community who create and maintain awesome software, including Yihui Xie, Mike Smith, Jonathan Weisberg, and many others.
Several scholars were very generous with their time and agreed to let me interview them. Thanks to Daniel Halperin, Salim Abdulla, Paul Garner, Wendy O’Meara, and Vikram Patel. Other colleagues shared comments on drafts, including Daniel Lakens, Solomon Kurz, Scott Cunningham, and Nick Huntington-Klein.
Finally, I appreciate my wife Eve for listening to boring stories about why I deleted certain paragraphs (and for suggesting I delete many others), my kids Tucker and Annie for listening quietly in the corners of seminar rooms throughout Asia while mom and I got feedback on our ideas, and my parents for always encouraging me.