Discovering Consensus: A Focus Group Study of Health Humanities Education

The last two decades have seen exponential growth in the number of US and Canadian health humanities programs. As an evolving field, there is significant variation across the structures and educational content of health humanities programs. This study was designed to solicit views from self-identified North American health humanities educators from academic programs. The primary aim was to garner broad perspectives on what distinguishes health humanities academic programs from other academic programs and what content programs should deliver to students. The goal was to distill defining features and parameters of a high-quality health humanities educational program, inquiring in particular about knowledge, skills, and values. Using Participatory Action Research methods, we conducted 14 focus group interviews composed of 89 participants. During phase one analysis, we applied 199 codes to interview transcripts, from which we identified 41 themes across seven domains: (1) Knowledge, (2) Education/Pedagogy, (3) Methodologic Approaches, (4) Skills, (5) Values, (6) Disciplinarity, and (7) Institutional Limitations/External Restrictions. Phase two analysis discerned that these themes inform five overarching themes that cross domains and educational levels: (1) Interdisciplinarity, (2) Internal Inquiry, (3) External Examination, (4) Praxis, and (5) Transformative Education. Our findings suggest that even though health humanities may have neither canonical knowledge bases nor universal methodologies, overarching themes speak to a consensus of field-level priorities that transcend programmatic variation. Further research is needed to improve tools and standards to aid in the growth, assessment, and evaluation of health humanities educational programs.