Daily Vitamin D3 Supplementation as a Treatment for Health Disparities

There is discordance in the vitamin D literature between correlational studies, which show an association between higher vitamin D exposure and good health, and randomized controlled trials of vitamin D supplementation, which are inconclusive. I test the theory that this discordance is due to false assumptions about how vitamin D affects human health. I use the method of systematic review and meta-analysis—accepting only experimental studies that supplement with the animal version of vitamin D, D3, not D2 or vitamin D metabolites or analogues, as well as accepting only studies with daily rather than less-frequent but larger doses—to show that daily vitamin D3 supplementation has a statistically-significant beneficial effect on blood pressure and markers of diabetes. Using nationally-representative correlational data, I also demonstrate that the health disparities in blood pressure, if not diabetes, will be eliminated only with new health policies dedicated to health education on the vast nutritional difference in vitamin D status between black and white Americans. As a part of this dissertation, I also developed an online multi-user web application to facilitate systematic reviews and meta-analyses

The Impacts of International Training Program in Pedagogy in Higher Education in the United States on Visiting Scholars in China

The longitudinal study was designed to investigate the impacts of International Training Program in Pedagogy (ITPP) at a midwestern institution in the US on the visiting scholars in seven cohorts from China in 2012–18. The study used the cohort survey research design method. The first part of the data was collected from 48 visiting scholars from Northwest Normal University in China who participated in the seven ITPP cohorts. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through several surveys from the beginning to the end of the training in each cohort from August to December each year in 2012-2018. In addition, a recent online impact survey was used to collect up-to-date data from the scholars in September 2020. The results of the quantitative and qualitative surveys revealed similar findings. It was found that the ITPP had significantly influenced all scholars. They had learned the American college teaching pedagogy in the US and exhibited different attitudes towards instruction and related practices in China. International implications result from the study

The Development, Description and Appraisal of an Emergent Multimethod Research Design to Study Workforce Changes in Integrated Care Interventions

In this paper, we provide a detailed and explicit description of the processes and decisions underlying and shaping the emergent multimethod research design of our study on workforce changes in integrated chronic care. The study was originally planned as mixed method research consisting of a pre- liminary literature review and quantitative check of these findings via a Delphi panel. However, when the findings of the literature review were not appropriate for quantitative confirmation, we chose to continue our qualitative exploration of the topic via qualitative questionnaires and secondary analysis of two best practice case reports. The resulting research design is schematically described as an emergent and interactive mul- timethod design with multiphase combination timing. In doing so, we provide other researchers with a set of theory- and experience-based options to develop their own multimethod research and provide an example for more detailed and structured reporting of emergent designs. We argue that the terminology developed for the description of mixed methods designs should also be used for multimethod designs such as the one presented here. Keywords: multimethod research, emergent design, qualitative research, integrated care, workforce change