Community partnerships or networks of collaborating public and nonprofit organizations are an important way of addressing a wide range of problems and needs that communities face. In the academic literature, network analysis has been used to analyze and understand the structure of the relationships that make up multiorganizational partnerships. But this tool is not well-known outside the small group of researchers who study networks, and it is seldom used as a method of assisting communities. This article briefly discusses network analysis and how community leaders can use the results generated by this tool to strengthen relationships among public and nonprofit organizations, thereby building the community's capacity to address critical needs in areas such as health, human services, social problems, and economic development.

This article presents the findings of a study examining the evolution of a network of health and human service organizations operating in a rural community on the Southwest border. The aim of the network was to build the capacity of the community to provide chronic disease education, prevention, and treatment services by developing collaborative relationships among a broad range of organizations. The impetus for the effort was based on receipt of a Turning Point grant. The findings, based on two waves of data collected 1 year apart, demonstrate how network structure and attitudes toward collaboration evolve as a community attempts to build capacity to address its health needs.

A network analysis was conducted in spring 2000 by the Southwest Center for Health Promotion in the U.S.-Mexico border community of Douglas, Arizona. The purpose of the analysis was to assess the level of collaboration among the 23 public and not-for-profit agencies that provided health and human services for a broad range of chronic disease prevention, screening, and treatment services. Data were also collected on levels of trust and anticipated outcomes (benefits and draw-backs) of collaboration. The article presents the findings of the network analysis, focusing on its usefulness as a tool for evaluating efforts at building community capacity through enhanced interagency collaboration.

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Analysis with improved race identification indicated that AI/AN populations experienced higher heart disease death rates than Whites. Better prevention and more effective care of heart disease is needed for AI/AN populations.

The first step in injury prevention is to understand the injury problem. This includes examining the nature of the problem from the perspective of the target community. This article uses qualitative methods to explain the nature of the injury problem and identifies prevention strategies through a three-step process: identify a causal model, validate the model, and identify strategies using the causal model. A causal model linking safety performance and safety demand, health decision making, and occupational stress was derived by secondary analysis of farm family focus group data (step 1) and validated by other farm family focus groups (step 2). Prevention strategies identified from the causal model (step 3) include decreasing the number of roles performed exclusively by one individual, developing an easy-to-use planning tool that assists farmers in anticipating and reducing future work demands, and developing an education module that incorporates injury costs into safety decision making.

INTRODUCTIONDuring the past half century, traumatic injuries have emerged as a pre-em inent public health challenge. Injury is the leading cause of hospitalization and death in persons younger than 45 years of age; results in more years of potential life lost than cancer or heart disease; and is second only to respiratory conditions as a reason for contact with physicians (3). One third of all nonfatal injuries and one sixth of all injury fatalities among adults aged 20 to 64 occur on the job (3).The public health response to a broad spectrum of occupational health and safety problems has embraced three traditional applications of epide miology: surveillance; etiologic research (i.e. studies to identify risk factors); and evaluation of the effect of interventions. With the increased recognition of injury as a serious public health problem, it is logical that efforts to prevent and control occupational injury should rely on the same epidemio logical approach used to attack other public health problems (9, 13).In industry and government, the role of surveillance in identifying the most important occupational injury problems, targeting high-risk popUlations, and monitoring trends has been recognized for a long time (16, 26, 28,48). The application of epidemiological methods to the study of the etiology of occupational injury is far less common.This review is intended to summarize etiologic studies of occupational injuries, identify their methodological strengths and limitations, point out needs for methodological improvement in such studies, and suggest a research agenda. In order to limit the scope of this broad topic, studies focusing exclusively on musculoskeletal injuries and intentional injuries have been excluded from this review. The epidemiological research literature on back injuries has been reviewed elsewhere (l6a, 18a, 37). Intentional injuries have only been recognized as a serious public health problem (outside and within the workplace) within the past decade (2a, 34, 52a, 58) and the preponderance of causality studies to date have appeared in criminology and sociology literature, rather than in the public health literature. BACKGROUND

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