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.)
My health outcome of interest is preterm birth, and two key factors that I chose which lead to preterm birth are illicit drug use during pregnancy and poor nutrition. While there are usually issues with measuring these factors due to low-social desirability bias and self-reporting bias, these factors are important to consider in the clinical management of women at risk of preterm birth. The research on illicit drug use in regards to preterm birth has been largely focused on the potential negative impacts of cocaine use, which may cause vasoconstriction, and as a result cause as high as a twofold risk in preterm birth risk. Whereas, poor nutrition can be an underlying cause of other adverse birth outcomes such as gestational diabetes, there has also been a large focus on better understanding how dietary composition can lead to micro-nutrient deficiencies during pregnancy. As I mentioned earlier, the causal pathways relating illicit drug use and poor nutrition to preterm birth are not entirely clear as they are both very difficult risk factors to measure.
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.
My research is centered on better understanding behavioral and psychosocial factors for preterm birth among women of color, specifically Black and Latina women. Previous work has heavily relied on “mother-blame” narratives when describing drug use among pregnant women of color. However, I would like to contribute to emerging research that studies drug use among pregnant women within the context of historical racism, oppression, trauma, and other adverse experiences. I think this approach would best lend itself to a qualitative study with women of color, to better understand the reasons for their drug use, but contextualizing these choices within their overall life experiences.
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?
Yes, I believe that we do need to continue studying how these behaviors influence health outcomes, because there is merit in better understanding the causal pathways that link health behaviors to health outcomes. Further, if we stopped studying key health behaviors, we cannot examine different interactions between these behaviors and other psychosocial factors which influence health outcomes.