- 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.)
In my work, I aim to measure the causal link between the quality of leadership and management displayed in global health programs and the health outcomes they seek to impact. Two behaviors described in the readings that are important to my work are a) the focus of health professionals on individual decisions and b) the recognition of self-control as a limited resource.
- 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.
I am currently studying, through qualitative methods, whether those who design and implement global health programs think that leadership and management are important to reaching the health outcomes of those programs, to what degree leadership and management are focused on (explicitly included, discussed, funded, evaluated, etc.) in their work, and why/why not. Given the nature of my work, this has less to do with the more frequently used SES factors, but I hypothesize that it may be related with other social factors including the educational background of the individuals (e.g. clinical or not), the funding mechanisms (e.g. self-funded or grant funded or specifically health focused or not), and the degree to which the implementer is related to the beneficiary population (ex-pat or not).
- 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?
Even though we know that behaviors are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income and/or education, I believe that it continues to be important to study the way that these behaviors influence health outcomes for several reasons. First, because it is unlikely that any intervention to change behavior alone will work well enough even when implemented perfectly to improve it to the level necessary to improve health outcomes to a degree at which disease is eradicated. Second, because these behaviors and the associated health outcomes still occur in the “best” neighborhood, income and education levels, so we must understand the complete relationship between them. Finally, because many of the health outcomes of interest that are affected by these behaviors (and influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education) are also known to have a biological component.