1. My health outcome is functional agency, a psychological and neurophysiological construct describing the human capacity for self-determining actions that support the individual’s ability to maintain physical and emotional homeostasis and progress towards personally or culturally salient adaptive goals (see week #2 homework). Two key behaviors related to this outcome are exercise and nutrition.
2. A randomized controlled trial of aerobic exercise to enhance agency would be a rigorous method to study one of the above behaviors. It would be desirable to use an active comparison condition (eg. health psychoeducation) to control for demand characteristics and non-specific factors. Race/ethnicity could be studied as a moderating variable.
3. Yes and no. We have plenty of evidence that health behaviors are structurally determined, but only a limited practical knowledge base about how to influence change at either behavioral or structural levels. This gap between basic and translational science means we still do need to pursue research that helps figure out pragmatic solutions. By “applied” I mean research designs with high ecological validity that involve rapid prototyping intended to yield actionable learning for intervention within a timeframe meaningful at a community/population level: that is, understanding that if we want to create evidence-based practices we need to generate more practice-based evidence, as Lawrence Green puts it --see:
https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/25/suppl_1/i20/542034/Making-research-relevant-if-it-is-an-evidence