Background and Context

Course History | Place in the Curriculum | Funding Sources

Course History

The Central Pennsylvania Center of Excellence (COE) for Research on Pregnancy Outcomes is a project of Penn State University and the partnering institutions of Franklin and Marshall College and Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. Participating faculty, including Sean Flaherty, Kirk Miller, and Berwood Yost, at Franklin & Marshall College designed "Public Health Research: Pregnancy Outcomes in American Women, " based on this research project. Alison Kibler joined Kirk Miller and Berwood Yost in the second year of the course. For the third iteration, all four of faculty participated. Sean is in the Department of Economics, Kirk, Department of Biology, Berwood, Director of the Floyd Institute Center for Opinion Research, and Alison, Department of American Studies and Program in Women and Gender Studies, Franklin & Marshall College.

Each time the course was offered it was over-subscribed, over its limit of 24 students. Several science majors, many social science majors, many majors in Special Studies: Public Health, and a smattering of humanities majors enrolled. Women were a large majority.

Place in the Curriculum

Our course has no formal role in F&M's undergraduate curriculum. However, we see it as a capstone course that brings together students from various disciplines in the sciences and social sciences and students interested in policy and service to explore a topic of importance in depth. The course draws on Franklin & Marshall nationally recognized programs in pre-healing arts, public policy (and health policy in particular) and American studies. It also exemplifies F&M's longstanding commitment to community-based learning and to connecting student learning to civic problems and questions of special concern to Lancaster city and the surrounding communities.

Funding Sources

Funding by the Pennsylvania Department of Health to the Penn State College of Medicine permitted the creation of the Pennsylvania Center of Excellence for Research on Pregnancy Outcomes. The creators of the course argued successfully that the education of future leaders in health care was important for the improvement of pregnancy outcomes and the course was included as a project of the Center.

This funding also allowed the Floyd Center for Opinion Research to perform two surveys that provide an important component of the course's design: a survey of a sample of 355 African-American and Hispanic women in Lancaster city and a survey of a sample of 288 Amish women in Lancaster County. In addition, we have access to the results of a survey of 2002 women in Central Pennsylvania that was the basis of the Central Pennsylvania Women's Health Study. The three surveys used the same instrument.