Using Concept Mapping in the development of a School of Public Health

Concept Mapping (CM), a participatory mixed-methods approach, can be used to obtain contributions from a large group of people for academic program planning. The planning of a School of Public Health (SPH) can potentially benefit from the broad-based input from CM. In this study, CM was used to prioritize a set of recommendations from local, national, and international PH stakeholders to begin the process of rebuilding the University of Hawaii (UH) SPH. The CM procedure consists of brainstorming, sorting and rating, data analysis, and clustering similar themes to develop a detailed and organized conceptual framework. The first step has participants completing the defined focus statement: “To build a world class SPH at UH that better serves local, regional, and international needs, an essential element is...”. The generated responses were distilled into unique themes, which were then rated on importance and feasibility. Cluster maps and pattern matches were used to analyze the rating results. A total of 147 unique themes were identified and grouped into 12 clusters. Based on the ratings, the Comprehensive Curriculum emerged as the most important cluster, followed by School Focus (range in mean values: 7.17 to 8.38). For feasibility, the highest ratings came from the School Focus cluster, followed by Comprehensive Curriculum (range in mean values: 6.01 to 7.85). The pattern matches also revealed a weak correlation between importance and feasibility (r=0.27). CM was useful in obtaining input from a broad range of stakeholder perspectives to identify relevant areas to address in the development of a SPH.