Evaluating the Impacts of Community-Campus Engagement on Population Health in Ottawa and Thunder Bay, Canada: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Contribution Analysis (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND Municipalities play a crucial role in population health due to their community connections and influence on health determinants. Community-campus engagement (CCE), that is, collaboration between academic institutions and communities, is a promising approach to addressing community health priorities. However, evidence of CCE’s impact on population health remains limited. Measuring the impacts of CCE is inherently complex due to factors such as diverse stakeholders, context-specific variables, and dynamic interactions within a community. OBJECTIVE This study aims to develop robust evidence on the impacts of CCE on population health outcomes in Ottawa and Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, focusing on 5 shared health priorities: housing, discrimination, poverty, violence, and mental health. METHODS We will use a proven CCE model called CityStudio, which has been implemented in both cities. We will use Mayne's mixed methods contribution analysis in three stages: (1) formulating a theory of change that outlines the expected contributions of CCE to population health outcomes; (2) gathering qualitative and quantitative data in line with the established Theory of Change; the data will be collected from various sources, including case studies of existing CityStudio projects, a web-based CCE stakeholder survey, a literature review, and population and community health data; and (3) reviewing the gathered evidence to determine the extent of CCE impacts on population health. RESULTS Ethical approval for this project was granted in May 2023. We have since initiated stage 1 by reviewing the literature to inform the development of the theory of change. We expect to complete this study by May 2026. CONCLUSIONS This study will address two critical gaps about how improving health outcomes depends on CCE: (1) how academic institutions can best engage with their communities to improve population health outcomes, and (2) how municipalities can engage with academic institutions to address their community health priorities. Conducting our work in differing contexts will allow us to consider a broader range of other influences on outcomes, thus making our work applicable to various settings and outcomes. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT PRR1-10.2196/58546
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.104 | 0.110 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.095 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".