Derose and Gubrium Named Co-editors-in-Chief of Community Health Journal

Sage Publishing has announced that Health Promotion and Policy (HPP) faculty members Kathryn Derose and Aline Gubrium have been named co-editors-in-chief of The International Quarterly of Community Health Education. Beginning with their debut issue in October 2021, the journal will be retitled Community Health Equity Research and Policy (CHERP).

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“We are enthusiastic about our vision for the journal and grateful to Sage for allowing us this latitude,” says Derose.

Adds Gubrium, “This new title succinctly communicates the broadened scope of the journal, and reinforces the integration of community health education and health policy to achieve health equity.”

Derose and Gubrium, both professors of community health education in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, continue the journal’s four-decade-plus stewardship under HPP editorial leadership first begun by professor emeriti George Cernada and David Buchanan.

Derose brings extensive mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) research experience focusing on understanding and addressing health inequalities, with particular expertise on the social determinants of health, faith-based organizations, community-based participatory research, immigrants' healthcare access, Latino populations and Latin America. Before coming to UMass, Derose was Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and prior to that lived and worked for nearly six years in health and development in Latin America.

Gubrium has wide-ranging experience using innovative and collaborative research methodologies, including narrative and arts-based approaches, with expertise in sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. She is a trained and experienced facilitator of digital storytelling workshops and uses the process in public health research, intervention, and advocacy contexts, working in diverse communities both nationally and internationally.

The new co-editors promise to bring an integrated vision to the journal that seeks to address the gap between academic research and practice. They aim to accomplish this by broadening the journal's focus on health equity, being inclusive of not only community health education but also health policy and healthcare issues; by increasing submissions about research with communities in the U.S. experiencing health inequalities, to complement the journal’s traditional focus on community health research outside the U.S.; by emphasizing environmental and structural changes backed by community-partnered and participatory approaches to understanding and addressing health inequities; and by increasing the number of high-quality articles using mixed-methods to better understand and creatively address health inequity.

They invite readers, authors, reviewers and contributors to join them in advancing the collective understanding of community health equity globally.