Mission/Vision
The goal of the proposed CSUN-San Fernando Valley (SFV) Collective to Reduce Health Disparities is to develop a research center to reduce health disparities for vulnerable populations from several disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The Collective will serve three areas of emphasis: (a), faculty support – to train CSUN faculty from many disciplines, primarily Psychology, along with community activists, to conduct culturally competent, relevant, and valid research with underserved populations and to disseminate that information to the academe, to the lay public, and to policy-makers, (b) student support – to develop workplace diversity by developing a cadre of undergraduate and graduate students who have been traditionally underrepresented in health disparities research by providing coursework, training, research experiences, and resources to enter and succeed in graduate programs, and (c) ecologically valid health disparities research and dissemination – to develop a collective for excellence in ecologically valid research that will explore alliances between university researchers and community organizations, schools, and other institutions to ensure greater ecological validity in health-related research and community research. The CSUN-SFV Collective to Reduce Health Disparities will serve as a hub for future collaborative work that supports health disparities researchers by developing EcoLab, a modifiable laboratory that can be made into environments that are representative of a home with kitchen and living room to study family interactions and to conduct interviews, focus groups, and community meetings; a restaurant to study eating behaviors; or a medical examination room to study health care issues such as communication, expectations, and stereotyping.
