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.)
One outcome I am interested in is prostate cancer. There are two key behaviors that come to mind when I think about factors leading to this outcome. One is partaking in screening for prostate cancer. Localized prostate cancer rarely presents with symptoms and is often detected via screening. In order to be screened, one has to be plugged into healthcare, trust the healthcare provider's intention when they want to screen you, etc. I think another key factor would be how to treat the prostate cancer and the behavior in mind would be "adherence to treatment." Although surgery is a one time deal, active surveillance and radiation therapy require you to be at multiple appointments and have the flexibility in your schedule for such a regimen.
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.
Certainly you could look at the proportion of individuals in a county/state/nation etc who engage in prostate cancer screening. One important social factor that should be addressed in this study would be race/ethnicity or even income/wealth/flexible work schedule. You could compare rates of prostate cancer screening by race/ethnicity or by income levels or wealth levels.
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 would say yes and no. I think understanding which behaviors lead to adverse health outcomes is important. If we just know that "this neighborhood" has bad outcomes, I think it could lead to stereotyping and not help to improve these outcomes. Rather, I think if we now know what behaviors lead to certain health outcomes we can then study how these larger factors (neighborhood, income, education, etc) lead to these behaviors. We know that individual behavior change is very difficult and probably not at the crux of the issue. However, if we learn how these larger socioecological factors play into this behavior, we can intervene on larger levels and impact more people. We may also learn how stress mediates this relationship.