The theoretical approach that I will be using to explore and understand the current curricula and policy at medical education centers will be qualitative document analysis. I will be gathering a lot of information from pre-existing curricula and policies from medical education centers like VCU (potentially UVA) to later assess their effectiveness. I think it would be interesting to be able to compare curricula and policies so I could see if it impacts effectiveness. After collecting my data I could eventually utilize interviews with different health care/ service providers/practitioners/clinicians, health administrators, support staff and patients/clients/health service users to determine whether or not current policies and curricula improve the provision of health care to racial/ethnic minority groups. My unit of analysis will be VCUs medical curricula and policy. We had discussed potentially including patients but I’m not sure how I could evaluate patients who have interacted with VCU medical school graduates? I still have to determine if it is something I would want to include but it is something I would like to discuss further.
You’ll need to determine whether you’re planning to compare existing curricula and policy with some kind of “ideal” or “model” approach, or whether your goal in analyzing documents is to determine the ideal or model approach. The answer to that will help you determine the kinds of questions you’ll need to ask as you conduct document analyses and address the issue of “effectiveness.” I have a feeling that you’re going to need to build a model of the “current state” of education first, then determine whether you can move forward to ask questions about effectiveness. The current state may lead you in a different direction than you intended. Document analysis is less a methodology and more a method, but “document analysis” is pretty broad and will need to have a theoretical framework through which to conduct an analysis.