Research Toolkit

CIRHT Research Toolkit

Collection Policy

Statement of Purpose

The Center for International Reproductive Health Training at the University of Michigan (CIRHT-UM) was founded in 2014 to partner with educational institutions in developing countries to strengthen the human resources for family planning (FP) and comprehensive abortion care (CAC). Through our faculty development program with partner schools, we provided faculty in OBGYN, midwifery, nursing, and collaborating departments with the skills, coaching, and professional networks to be exemplary educators, health providers, and researchers. Through these partnerships, we have provided research training across 11 colleges and universities in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Building on the lessons and materials from those projects, we distilled the 13 core competencies necessary for faculty to become independent research investigators. This toolkit maps those research competencies to some of the core materials that we used for our faculty development workshops and webinars. We collected these materials over the course of our 5 years of research training projects with partner health sciences institutions in Ethiopia and Rwanda. This collection has been selected from a larger pool of materials to represent the most pertinent resources that supported our training for the specific competencies in the research lifecycle. This toolkit focuses on the research program. There is a separate toolkit that focuses on the education program.

Copyright

The materials included here have been authored by project team members or selected from available materials online. The author for each resource is provided. All of the content included here is publicly available. The copyright status varies for each resource and is noted accordingly. Some are All Rights Reserved and others are Some Rights Reserved under various Creative Commons licenses (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/).
Materials produced by our staff and contractors are copyrighted by the Regents of the University of Michigan under Standard Practice Guide 601.28. Under the same SPG, materials produced by U-M faculty are copyrighted by the faculty and are used here with their permission.

Scope and Characteristics of Collection

This toolkit is intended to provide guidance to faculty and staff responsible for reproductive health education and research that aim to replicate or adapt the CIRHT-UM model in their settings. It serves as a companion resource to the CIRHT-UM Framework publication from 2018. The target audience for the collection is those responsible for research training for reproductive health and other topics. This includes school, department, or research institution heads, research investigators, site coordinators, project managers, and professional education directors.

Selection Process

The research training is structured to align with the skills needed to complete the ‘research lifecycle’, from research question to final publication and presentation of results. Building upon the research lifecycle, we have defined 13 core competencies necessary to become independent research investigators. These competencies have been common across all of the individual institutional partnerships. They have been aligned with the overarching program goals, the framework, and the monitoring and evaluation logic model.

Evaluation Criteria

We wanted this toolkit to represent the signature resources used throughout our past programs rather than an exhaustive list. The resources here have been curated by staff and faculty within the project to provide representative coverage across each of the competencies. The ones included here are those that were already available online, or for which we arranged permission to share.

Retention Policy

We are unable to guarantee permanent access through the CIRHT-UM website. In order to provide access for an extended period of time, many of the resources in the collection have been posted in the University of Michigan institutional repository, Deep Blue and in the other websites included in the dissemination plan section. Deep Blue has the commitment and capacity for long-term storage for these resources. Materials for which we have copyright permission has been included in the file download from Deep Blue . Materials for which we do not have copyright permission are included as web links.

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