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.)
Answer:
My health outcome of interest is improved access to health and well-being resources for NCAA Division I student-athletes. I think that two important behaviors that contribute to the current problem (student-athletes not using available resources) include 1) the obvious: student-athletes don't use the resources available to them, and 2) student-athletes choose not to do regular self-evaluation of physical and mental health, which means that they don't have a good way of knowing when they need to seek the resources available to them. Both behaviors need to be intervened on so that the athletes can lessen personal stress and more effectively navigate the challenges of being both a student and an athlete.
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.
Answer:
In order to study the above behaviors, and particularly #1 (student-athletes not seeking out resources available to them), I think that I would want to look at a few potential pathways that could be affecting this, including environmental context (general university context and Athletics Department), social and cultural norms within teams, and stress and social support. For example, if I were to look at the social and cultural norms of the student-athlete's team, I would want to ask the following questions:
- Is it socially acceptable for an athlete on this team to seek health and/or well-being resources?
- Is there any stigma around seeking health and/or wellbeing resources?
- How do student-athletes on this team typically spend their free time?
- Do student-athletes on this team talk about health and/or well-being?
- What are the health and well-being resource-seeking behaviors of the seniors on the team?
- How necessary do members of this team believe that seeking health and well-being resources is?
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?
Answer:
Even if key health behaviors are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, we do need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes because neighborhood, income, and/or education are not directly causally related to health outcomes; instead, they mediate relationships. In other words, without the health behaviors, the health outcomes wouldn't exist. This means that we can't understand the entire relationship between neighborhood/income/education and health outcomes without also looking at the health behaviors.