How to Get Real in Public Health
Lori Leonard, an associate professor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, takes an ethnographic approach to research: observing the lives of a few individuals over long periods of time rather than comparing thousands of people in search of statistical correlations. Under Leonard’s guidance, Emma Tsui used such qualitative methods when completing her dissertation. For that work, published in April in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness, Tsui zoomed in on the lives of two East Baltimore residents and observed how chronic illness affected their success in a job-training program.As a newly minted assistant professor at Lehman College at the City University of New York, Tsui is still interested in the intersection of work and health; she’s now studying the people, mostly female immigrants, who cook institutional food. Leonard, meanwhile, is finishing up a book about her 12 years studying the families living near an oil pipeline in Chad. In late June, via a Baltimore-to-Bronx Skype connection, the two discussed how their ethnographic perspective—though in the margins of the public health field—could influence policymakers.Read more at...Johns Hopkins Magazine, Fall 2012.