This post, by Tyler Boyd, is building off of his research on the evolution of global health education here and here. The first significant chunk of my research has been primarily focused on structured, academic programs in global health. While that work is ongoing, I have also begun to explore how student-led global health organizations on college campuses have grown and effected the growing field of global health education.
One of the first things that struck me was a high concentration of chapters within a few institutions. In terms of the reach of these organizations, at least one of these national orgs is present at colleges and universities. As a first step in visualizing this data, I graphed the geographic distribution of these chapters by state Figure 1.
Previously, I had posted a similar distribution for academic global health programs Figure 2 , and these two figures largely parallel one another in terms of the loci of global health engagement in universities. In order to achieve a more proportionate perspective, I normalized the state distributions by comparing the number of global health academic programs or student groups to the total number of four year colleges and universities in each state Figure 3.
This visualization provides an interesting counterbalance to Figures 1 and 2. Here, states such as California, New York, and Illinois, all among the top 10 in number of global health programs, fall to near the bottom of the pack. The normalized data provides an interesting contrast, as some of these states may not come to mind as nexuses of global health education.
Both methods certainly have limitations, but when viewed in concert, perhaps a snapshot of global health education may begin to emerge. Instead, they are two of the easiest ways to quantify and begin to understand this complex and emerging field.
