Reflexive Statement About the Authorship Team

Four of us wrote this book together. We are similar in many ways, yet we each bring our own unique professional and personal experiences to teaching qualitative research methods in public health. All four of us are PhD-trained, tenured professors at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Two of us completed our doctoral training at the same school where we now teach. The other two completed doctoral training in programs of Anthropology and Sociology, including one of us who trained outside of the United States. All of us are white, cisgender American women. All of us do work that would generally be characterized as more applied than theoretical. We each focus on different public health topic areas, including cancer control and lived experiences of chronic disease in the United States, health disparities and implementation of public health programs in the United States and Eastern Europe, HIV and sexual health in Africa, and policy implementation to prevent injury and violence in the United States. Each of us identifies primarily as a qualitative researcher and has extensive experience contributing to mixed methods public health research. Between us, we have extensive experience conducting qualitative studies based on qualitative interview data (from open-ended narrative interviews to ethnographic, to semi-structured or structured to key informant). We have conducted studies that draw extensively on focus group data and documents. We have undertaken observational and ethnographic research and have substantial experience publishing work based on analysis of various documents pertinent to public health. Two of us primarily focus on research within the U.S., and two internationally—but all of us have conducted research inside and outside the U.S. None of us identify as a truly community-engaged researcher who fully embodies community-based participatory research practices, although we all attempt to be responsible and ethical research partners. We each engage with the policy process and public health programs somewhat differently.