Social Media Campaign Effects: Moderating Role of Social Capital in an Anti-Smoking Campaign

This study examined the effects of an anti-smoking campaign that employs a crowdsourcing method with a social networking service. Drawing upon social capital scholarship and the expression effect research paradigm in eHealth systems, the study also investigated the roles of social trust and community life satisfaction in the social media campaign that has a specific geographical boundary. To that end, we conducted an experiment using a two-group pretest–posttest design. We randomly assigned 201 participants to two conditions: “campaign message reception only” as a control group and “message reception and expression” as a treatment group in which participants fully engaged in the campaign process by sharing their own campaign ideas with other participants. Findings revealed that social trust and community life satisfaction interacted with the treatment condition to positively affect persuasive intentions, but in distinct ways. Social trust moderated the effect of the message reception and interaction condition on participants’ willingness to encourage community members to stop smoking. In contrast, community life satisfaction moderated the effect of the treatment condition on encouraging others to comply with the community’s anti-smoking policy. These results provide theoretical and practical implications related to the roles of social capital in geographically defined social media campaigns.     

Intergenerational understandings of personal,social and community assets for health

Connecting local citizens of different ages in productive social activity is considered a pathway towards greater health. This research explores how older adults and young people interpret and access assets from their geographical community in relation to their well-being and the extent to which a process of intergenerational bridging contributes to the creation of additional assets for health. Data is presented from a process of place-mapping, interviews, observations and arts-based approaches to: a) understand how personal, social and community assets supported perceived health and wellbeing for the young children and older adults who participated; and b) explore the impact of intergenerational connection on enhancing social capital. The research utilised bonding, bridging and linking forms of social capital, across several interactions amongst 41 individuals who reside in the same geographical community (Victoria, Australia). Assets for health, common across generations and located within the same geographical community were identified. Social connections were strengthened through conversations, reflections and an integration of ideas facilitated through an arts-based approach. Findings suggest that through intergenerational connection and sharing of resources to support health, including the sharing of community assets, progress can be made towards community strengthening with implications for health and wellbeing.     

Reducing diabetes health disparities through community-based participatory action research: the Chicago Southeast Diabetes Community Action Coalition

To address disproportionately high rates of diabetes morbidity and mortality in some of Chicago's medically underserved minority neighborhoods, a group of community residents, medical and social service providers, and a local university founded the Chicago Southeast Diabetes Community Action Coalition, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention REACH 2010 Initiative. A community-based participatory action research model guided coalition activities from conceptualization through implementation. Capacity building activities included training on: diabetes, coalition building, research methods, and action planning. Other activities sought to increase coalition members' understanding of the social causes and potential solutions for health disparities related to diabetes. Trained coalition members conducted epidemiologic analyses, focus groups, a telephone survey, and a community inventory. All coalition members participated in decisions. The participatory process led to increased awareness of the complexities of diabetes in the community and to a state of readiness for social action. Data documented disparities in diabetes. The participatory action research approach (a) encouraged key stakeholders outside of the health care sector to participate (e.g., business sector, church groups); (b) permitted an examination of the sociopolitical context affecting the health of the community; (c) provided an opportunity to focus on preventing the onset of diabetes and its complications; (d) increased understanding of the importance of community research in catalyzing social action aimed at community and systems change and change among change agents.     

A gender analysis of a national community health workers program: A case study of Afghanistan

Gender equity can be a neglected issue in health system reforms. This paper explores the multiple layered gender dynamics of the Afghan Community Health Worker (CHW) Program within broader health system reforms in Afghanistan using a qualitative research design. We interviewed policy makers, health managers, CHWs and community members in 16 sites in 2013 and 2014. We found that gendered societal norms interact and influence the Afghan CHW program in a dynamic way. Gendered social norms around the division of labour tend to privilege women in terms of access to resources at the community level, but it is men who hold leadership positions that ultimately decide how the resources are to be distributed. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health expresses a commitment to gender equity, but policies on gender are restricted to reproductive health, thus constraining a gender-equity approach as focused on maternal and child health. Our explicit gender analysis not only reveals gender inequities in the Afghan CHW Program and the broader health system, it also uncovers how a highly gendered division of health labour provides some opportunities for women’s empowerment that can disrupt patriarchal role constraints and broader gender inequities.     

Factors related to preference for participation and degree of commitment in community activities among older adults in Japanese depopulated areas

To address the rapid increase in the ageing population, Japan implemented the Long‐Term Care Insurance System (LTCS) in 2000. Additionally, a community‐based integrated community care system was released in 2012. The purpose of these policies was to help older people who need care or support to continue to live their preferred lifestyles in their own communities. According to this paradigm, older residents are themselves considered members of the community caregiving team and expected to participate in volunteer activities to help the neighbourhood. One such activity is social participation including community activities. Many factors influencing social participation have been found in previous literature. However, knowledge of specific factors about community activities is limited, even though these kinds of activities have attracted policy attention. Our study examined factors related to thoughts about community activities among people aged >40 years. We conducted random sampling in two depopulated areas in Japan and used an anonymous mail survey method. Our survey consisted of three parts: social demographics, health and life, and medical/long‐term care. A total of 2,466 individuals participated in the study (response rate 52.2%), whose average age was 64.2 (SD = 10.3) and 46.5% (n = 1,146) were female. Items including talking with neighbours frequently (social demographics), higher self‐rated health (health and life), the need for health consultations and the desire to take care of family members when they need help (medical/long‐term care) were significantly related to both preference for participation and degree of commitment in community activities. To encourage participation in community activities among older citizens, we recommend interventions related to health literacy and family ties.     

From distributions of deviance to definitions of difference: past and future mental health geographies

This paper reviews research in mental health geography that has examined landscapes of deinstitutionalisation, community care and everyday social life. It complements Philo's (1997, Across the water: reviewing geographical studies of asylums and other mental health facilities. Health and Place 3, 73-89) review of geographical studies concerned with asylums and other mental health facilities. Offering an interpretation of developments in this research sub-field, it charts a 'first wave' and a 'second wave' of inquiries, identifying shifts of substantive emphasis, theoretical approach and methodological practice. The gains and drawbacks of both 'waves' are discussed, with particular attention to absences both in what is researched and in the extent of political and policy engagement. The possible contours of a 'third wave' mental health geography, building on the strengths of earlier research but addressing new questions in new ways, are outlined in conclusion.     

In praise of sport: promoting sport participation as a mechanism of health among persons with a disability

BackgroundAchieving and maintaining health are no less important to people with a disability than they are to anyone else; it is just typically more challenging. This report explores sport as a mechanism of health for people with a disability. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is used to frame the analysis and discussion of the narratives of 12 women and men with a disability who participate in sport.ObjectiveThe goal was to describe how participating in sport, broadly defined, helps persons with a disability achieve and maintain health and health-related components of well-being. The ICF was used to frame a secondary analysis and discussion of participant narratives.MethodsParticipants with physical or sensory disabilities responded to a request for participation in in-depth interviews to explore their sport participation; snowball sampling was used to ensure maximum variation in demographic characteristics. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. A secondary analysis was conducted that focused on the relationship of the data categories to the ICF.ResultsSport benefits included enhanced functional capacity, health promotion, relationship development, increased optimism, and inclusion in meaningful life activities and roles. Health professionals were vital in introducing and encouraging people with disabilities to participate in sport.ConclusionsSport is a valuable and promising mechanism for fostering physical and emotional health and building valuable social connections. Health professionals, in concert with individual, family, and community members, may use the framework of the ICF to guide their clinical and educational reasoning for enhancing sport participation among persons with a disability.     

Health Sciences and Public Librarians Partnering to Create a Culture of Health

Individuals with low health literacy experience negative health outcomes such as longer or absent recoveries, diminished quality of life, frequent and longer hospitalizations, and morbidity. The role of librarians is changing and librarians are playing a proactive role in fostering community health by providing health information resources, offering training opportunities, and partnering with local health organizations and health care providers to develop programs. This article discusses how an academic health sciences librarian and a public librarian combined their expertise and resources to create a successful partnership that continues today. The librarians were also invited to participate in a community health improvement plan (CHIP) of two major hospitals in New Jersey. The CHIP culminated in a symposium that brought together public and academic health sciences librarians and other constituents from the community who are interested in building a Culture of Health in New Jersey.     

Cancer Talk on Twitter: Community Structure and Information Sources in Breast and Prostate Cancer Social Networks

This study suggests taking a social networks theoretical approach to predict and explain patterns of information exchange among Twitter prostate and breast cancer communities. The authors collected profiles and following relationship data about users who posted messages about either cancer over 1 composite week. Using social network analysis, the authors identified the main clusters of interconnected users and their most followed hubs (i.e., information sources sought). Findings suggest that users who populated the persistent-across-time core cancer communities created dense clusters, an indication of taking advantage of the technology to form relationships with one another in ways that traditional one-to-many communication technologies cannot support. The major information sources sought were very specific to the community health interest and were grassroots oriented (e.g., a blog about prostate cancer treatments). Accounts associated with health organizations and news media, despite their focus on health, did not play a role in these core health communities. Methodological and practical implications for researchers and health campaigners are discussed.     

Gerontological social work and cardiac rehabilitation

Cardiac rehabilitation is a setting in which integrating social work services can benefit older adults. Many cardiac rehabilitation patients endorse symptoms of stress and depression following a cardiac event, impeding their ability to participate fully in cardiac rehabilitation services or recover from a heart attack. Gerontologically trained social workers can improve the care of older adults with heart disease in a variety of ways and this paper discusses the potential roles social workers can play in enhancing care. Two examples demonstrating how community academic partnerships can lead to improved options for older adults following a heart attack are discussed. First, using a microsystems approach, social workers embedded within cardiac rehabilitation may improve patient quality of life, address social service needs, provide mental health treatment, and assist in the completion of standard cardiac rehabilitation assessments. Second, using a macrosystems approach, social workers can help communities by developing partnerships to establish infrastructure for new cardiac rehabilitation clinics that are integrated with mental health services in rural areas. Social workers can serve an important role in addressing the psychological or social service needs of cardiac rehabilitation patients while increasing access to care.     

'That's just the cesspool where they dump all the trash': exploring working class men's perceptions and experiences of social capital and health

This article explores issues relating to the concept of social capital which has been become an important explanation for inequalities in health. It is based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with working class men living in two contrasting socio-economic areas--one relatively disadvantaged and one advantaged. It highlights the role of different community contexts in the nature and extent of local social capital. In particular, it demonstrates how de-industrialization and economic change as well as material deprivation and a perceived dis-investment in local communities impacted on the men's levels of social capital. Analysis also shows the ways in which gender mediates the processes through which social capital is developed and accessed as a personal and social resource, and how the norms and values associated with working class masculinities appeared to preclude the men from building supportive health-enhancing relationships with others in their community. The prominence of social capital has focused attention on the subjective dimensions of community life as potential determinants of health. This article has, therefore, sought to contribute to this field by widening our understanding about the relationship between social capital, gender and health.     

An interactive integrative approach to translating knowledge and building a "learning organization" in health services management

This paper proposes a basic approach to ensuring that knowledge from research studies is translated for use in health services management with a view towards building a "learning organization". (A learning organization is one in which the environment is structured in such a way as to facilitate learning as well as the sharing of knowledge among members or employees.) This paper highlights various dimensions that determine the complexity of knowledge translation, using the problem-solving cycle as the backbone for gaining a better understanding of how different types of knowledge interact in health services management. It is essential to use an integrated and interactive approach to ensure that knowledge from research is translated in a way that allows a learning organization to be built and that knowledge is not used merely to influence a single decision in isolation from the overall services and management of an organization.     

Health transition among Pacificans: unpacking imperialism

What and who defines health? In the Pacific at least, health is not only an individual's state of well-being. It also refers to the positive state of the social body i.e. how people within a community interact with each other and with their environment to produce positive and desired effects. Even death can be viewed as a positive stage in human life if it facilitates the achievement of well-being as one transit or translocates to the next stage of 'eternal bliss'. The pursuit of health and well-being has resulted in many challenges over time in many communities. Health transition has been seen as a phenomenon that can be defined by the various eras of disease occurrence. Various morbidity and mortality indicators are used to measure these. According to health transition theorists, this phenomenon is linear and similar for all societies. However, this linear approach is not cognizant of the many dimensions of social, mental, physical and spiritual well-being that encompasses the life and death of Pacificans. This paper attempts to tease out the various forces that have influenced the health transition phenomenon in the Pacific. Specifically, it argues that the forces of imperialism, colonialism and globalization have largely influenced health transition in the Pacific in a manner that is to some extent, both unfavorable and oppressive. It raises the difficulty of using morbidity and mortality as measures of transition in societies where people do not die but are believed to just translocate to another life. The paper ends by suggesting alternate ways of looking at the multidimensional processes of health changes in the Pacific.     

Towards a sociology of disease

We argue for a sociology of health, illness, and disease. Under the influence of Talcott Parsons, the social study of health began as medical sociology and then morphed into sociology of health and illness, focusing largely on the social aspects of health-related topics. Social scientists have been reluctant to tackle disease in its physiological and biological manifestations. The result is an impoverishment of sociological analysis on at least three levels: social scientists have rarely made diseases central to their inquiries; they have been reluctant to include clinical endpoints in their analysis; and they have largely bracketed the normative purpose of health interventions. Consequently, social scientists tend to ignore what often matters most to patients and health care providers, and the social processes social scientists describe remain clinically unanchored. A sociology of disease explores the dialectic between social life and disease; aiming to examine whether and how social life matters for morbidity and mortality and vice versa. Drawing from specific advances in science and technology studies and social epidemiology, we point to ways that sociologists can participate as health researchers.     

Social venues that protect against and promote HIV risk for young men in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

Developing effective place-based health interventions requires understanding of the dynamic between place and health. The therapeutic landscape framework explains how place-based social processes and physical geography interact and influence health behavior. This study applied this framework to examine how venues, or social gathering places, influenced HIV risk behavior among young, urban men in Tanzania. Eighty-three public venues where men aged 15–19 met new sexual partners were identified by community informants in one city ward. The majority (86%) of the venues were called ‘camps’, social gathering places that had formal leaders and members. Observations were conducted at 23 camps and in-depth interviews were conducted with 36 camp members and 10 camp leaders in 15 purposively selected camps.     

Soliciting views of various communities on health research: a prelude to engagement in specific research projects

BackgroundMembers of the public are increasingly engaged in health‐service and biomedical research and provide input into the content of research, design and data sharing. As there is variation among different communities on how research is perceived, to engage all sectors of the general public research institutions need to customize their approach.ObjectiveThis paper explores how research institutions and community leaders can partner to determine the best ways to engage different sectors of the public in research.DesignFollowing a literature review, a research institution engaged with four different sectors of the public through their respective representative community‐based organizations (CBOs) by interviews with leaders, community member focus groups and a joint project.SettingSan Diego and Imperial Counties, California, United States of America (USA).ConclusionBefore embarking on more specific research projects, investigators can gain valuable insights about different communities'' attitudes to, and understanding of, health services and biomedical research by interacting directly with members of the community, collaborating with community leaders, and jointly identifying steps of engagement tailored to the community.     

Improving collaboration between researchers and communities

Active collaboration between communities and researchers is critical to developing appropriate public health research strategies that address community concerns. To capture the perspectives of inner-city Seattle communities about issues in community-researcher partnerships, Seattle Partners for Healthy Communities conducted interviews with community members from the ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Central and Southeast Seattle. The results suggest that effective community-researcher collaborations require a paradigm shift from traditional practices to an approach that involves: acknowledging community contributions, recruiting and training minority people to participate in research teams, improving communication, sharing power, and valuing respect and diversity.     

Health and social fields in the context of lifestyle migration

Migrants occupy different social fields encompassing both their origin and their destination. Much previous work on interactions within these fields has focused on economic migrants. In this paper we seek to understand the social fields occupied by British pensioners who have moved to Spain and how these interact with their health and their experience of the healthcare system. We explore the links between health, social fields, healthcare, place and social relationships. We use in-depth interviews conducted among those living in a variety of settings. We draw upon Bourdieu's concept of habitus and social fields and differentiate, between ways of being and ways of belonging in the fields. We identified three social fields. The first embraced interviewees' social networks back in the UK where implicit comparisons of healthcare were made. The second embraced their expatriate social networks in Spain which includes their conceptualization of a “healthy life”, while the third included the interaction with Spanish institutions, including the healthcare system. This conceptual framework provides new insights for those considering retirement abroad, and those that want to understand how lifestyles and navigating distinct social fields influence health and the healthcare experience.     

Trust and collaboration in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases

High rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are sustained in communities by a relatively small group of people, referred to as the core of transmission. Definitions of the core vary but inevitably include people who are socially marginalized and who distrust people in authority, such as public health practitioners and university researchers. Having an effect on a marginalized group usually depends on effective collaboration with people they trust. Researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health developed a trust-based collaboration with community members of a rural county in North Carolina to implement an STD prevention program that, in turn, relied on trust in local social networks. As part of the STD prevention demonstration project, the research team established a community resource group made up of local African Americans who helped design, implement, and evaluate the intervention. The group identified 21 women to whom others in the community turned for advice on sex and STDs. These women were trained as lay health advisors to disseminate information and skills for preventing STDs among their social networks. Through face-to-face structured interviews before and after the intervention, the authors measured improvements in STD treatment and prevention behaviors. The proportion of people practicing each of the targeted behaviors improved during the evaluation period. In addition to disseminating information through their own social networks, the lay health advisors demonstrated new skills and a desire to interact with local care providers to influence the provision of care for STDs for low-income African Americans in this county. Each participant in the collaboration played a role in establishing or building upon trust with others. These trusting relationships were critical for empowering a marginalized group at high risk for STDs.     

The assets-based approach: furthering a neoliberal agenda or rediscovering the old public health? A critical examination of practitioner discourses

The ‘assets-based approach’ to health and well-being has, on the one hand, been presented as a potentially empowering means to address the social determinants of health while, on the other, been criticised for obscuring structural drivers of inequality and encouraging individualisation and marketisation; in essence, for being a tool of neoliberalism. This study looks at how this apparent contestation plays out in practice through a critical realist-inspired examination of practitioner discourses, specifically of those working within communities to address social vulnerabilities that we know impact upon health. The study finds that practitioners interact with the assets-based policy discourse in interesting ways. Rather than unwitting tools of neoliberalism, they considered their work to be about mitigating the worst effects of poverty and social vulnerability in ways that enhance collectivism and solidarity, concepts that neoliberalism arguably seeks to disrupt. Furthermore, rather than a different, innovative, way of working, they consider the assets-based approach to simply be a re-labelling of what they have been doing anyway, for as long as they can remember. So, for practitioners, rather than a ‘new’ approach to public health, the assets-based public health movement seems to be a return to recognising and appreciating the role of community within public health policy and practice; ideals that predate neoliberalism by quite some considerable time.