LOHP has a strong history of building and facilitating community-university research partnerships. Our goals are to engage the workers and communities who are most impacted by the issues being investigated and to promote ways for research findings to be translated into action.
As part of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, we help bring the resources of the university to communities to address occupational and environmental health concerns. We emphasize a participatory research approach to involve workers and community members in the development of research questions, approaches, analysis, and dissemination of findings. We have developed “Research to Practice” resources to help occupational safety and health researchers strategically think about how to move their research findings into the world for impact.
We conduct qualitative research through focus groups and key informant interviews to better understand perceptions and experiences that influence worker health, and to do formative research as part of intervention design and evaluation. We also support worker organizations in developing research questions or conducting surveys or interviews to better document a problem or understand the extent of a problem.
LOHP participates in national committees initiated by the National Institute for Occupational and Safety and Health (NIOSH) to set and inform a national occupational health research agenda (NORA). These are the Health Care and Social Assistance and Healthy Workforce Design committees.
Examples of projects:
Nail Salons Worker Leadership Program
We are collaborating with the CA Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative on community-based participatory research focused on worker leadership development and reducing harmful chemicals that may put workers at risk for breast cancer. Together with Vietnamese nail salon workers, we are building the partnership, designing focus groups and interview research, and developing a leadership development curriculum. Workers bring powerful stories from their experiences as refugees, highlighting their resilience and readiness to improve working conditions in nail salons.
Chinatown Restaurant Workers
In partnership with the Chinese Progressive Association, other researchers, and the local health department, we carried out a community-based participatory research project that exposed sweatshop conditions in restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We helped train and engage restaurant worker partners in all aspects of the study, and they conducted over 400 surveys in the community. The findings, which documented numerous hazards and labor violations including widespread wage theft, were used to achieve ground-breaking wage theft policy change and enforcement success.
Workload in the Janitorial Industry
In response to growing concern about substantial workload increases for janitors, LOHP collaborated with SEIU-USWW to conduct qualitative research through six focus groups in California. Findings document excess workload that manifests in myriad ways, including the increase in density within floors as well as in the number and complexity of tasks, the unrealistic quantity of tasks for the hours worked, and the number of hours distributed across fewer workers. Workers described how a high workload environment stems from, and can reinforce, tense employer-worker and inter-worker dynamics, and how the increased workload impacts physical health resulting in physical injury as well as work-related stress and other mental health outcomes.
High-Quality Health and Safety Training for Career Technical Education (CTE) programs
Reaching new and younger workers entering the construction workforce is critical to ensuring that safe work practices are learned early in a person’s career. Many enter the field through CTE construction programs at the high school or community/technical college level. LOHP partnered with West Virginia University and conducted a study to assess the extent and quality of health and safety education in these programs, and to identify what instructors and administrators consider essential elements for effectiveness. This study resulted in materials that CTE programs can use to strengthen their program’s safety and health systems to prepare their students.
