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Dr. Denckla developed and leads a new course, called “SBS 237 Grief, Loss, and Death: Population Mental Health Perspectives.” This course meets the interdisciplinary concentration in two programs: Population Mental Health and Women, Gender, and Health. (view syllabus here)
This course aims to fill the gap left in public health curricula wherein students have few academic opportunities to engage with the profound themes of grief, loss, and death, even in an era of pandemics, climate change, and widening health disparities. This 8-week seminar-style course will focus on the application of a population mental health perspective to grief, loss, and death in a self-reflective, supportive environment. Students can expect to acquire an understanding of the core theories and empirical methods in population mental health, grief, loss, and death. Students will apply these acquired skills and knowledge to achieve their learning goals within an ungrading framework.
Dr. Denckla also teaches “SBS 281 Principles of Social and Behavioral Research.” This course is required for Master’s students in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In Fall 2022, 50 students were enrolled in SBS 281.
SBS 281 equips students with the skills necessary to conduct and critically evaluate social and behavioral research in public health. The first part of the course focuses on quantitative social science research methods of importance to public health and covers issues related to ethics, measurement, study design, survey research methods, questionnaire development, sampling, and data collection. The second part of the course teaches students to critically evaluate research through a series of hands-on case studies. In these case studies, particular focus is paid to how social science theories and constructs are developed and tested. Lectures are paired with weekly interactive laboratory sessions that expose students to the complexities of conducting research.