Under this key theme, we are interested in all areas of research relating to health promotion theory, policy, and practice, especially with an international focus. In our work, we see health promotion as being the social and political process of enabling people to increase control over and improve their health. This is achieved through actions aimed at strengthening individual awareness and skill; changing individual behaviour; empowering communities and changing social, organisational, political, and economic conditions that support good health and wellbeing.
Our main areas of current research relate particularly to healthy public policy, sexual and reproductive health, capacity building, and monitoring and evaluation approaches in health promotion. This research is based broadly on the settings approach which emphasises a key shift away from a reductionist and pathogenic focus on individual health problems, risk factors, and linear causality. Instead, such an approach focuses more on salutogenic perspectives to the creation of positive health assets including supportive environments and social conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age.
Healthy settings are where people actively use and shape the environment within larger social (including global) structures. We are therefore interested in research that explores how settings can create or solve problems relating to health, and how they can function as complex and inter-linked systems in order to increase understanding of how effective health improvement can be developed. We are also interested in evaluating interventions, actions, and/or policies through the use of qualitative methodologies that can deepen our understanding of how and why different interventions work in particular contexts and at different times; and in different places.
