1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
Key health outcome of interest: satisfaction with contraceptive choice
Two behaviors that are important factors leading to health outcome:
- access and ability to choose from an array of contraceptive choices
- understanding the side effects of contraceptive choices
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach.
-You could study peoples’ satisfaction with their choice of contraceptive and then look at their race/ethnicity, how close they live to an accessible physician’s office and which options the physician’s office provides, and their income/savings, as well as their level of education. I would also like to look at segregation in the neighborhood that the individual was living in to see if people who live in highly segregated or integrated neighborhoods are more/less satisfied with their contraceptive choice.
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not?
I think that we do need to continue to study how key behaviors are influenced by neighborhood. I think that access to food and to outdoor safe spaces as well as the safety that one feels in their neighborhood has some of the strongest effects on if someone can access healthy foods and exercise. These are the basics to keeping large populations healthy and the lack of healthy foods and lack of exercise effect so many different pathologies in disease courses that being able to have a direct impact on those two behaviors would have the biggest impact in changing health outcomes across the board. So, figuring out which changes on the neighborhood level make healthy food and exercise more available is still unknown and would be important to keep studying.