The Importance of Context in Understanding Behavior and Promoting Health

Abstract

Behavior, the roles of behavior in health, health promotion, health, quality of life, and death are all contextdependent. This paper begins with a review of behavioral and ecological models, emphasizing their shared emphasis on context. It then turns to genetics and the importance of contexts in understanding genetic influences. Jumping from genes to geography, it examines how spatial analysis provides both a model and framework for considering contextual influence. Continuing with analytic models, it returns to genetics, and considers how it provide models for integrating our understanding of broad social and community influences. The paper extends this thinking through multilevel analysis and proposes "analytic multilevel designs" as a way of studying "context focused interventions" (as opposed to context independent interventions for which conventional experimental designs are often well-suited). It closes with reflections on ways in which we cultivate and extend our knowledge base and on the intellectual contexts of positivism and postmodernism that surround behavioral and ecological thinking.

‘The big ole gay express’: sexual minority stigma, mobility and health in the small city

“…Participants described engaging in anonymous sex with men ‘passing through’ small city spaces and also in sex during travel. To the extent that health behaviour is determined by local norms and social identities, this intersection of sex and mobility might circumvent one's otherwise health-promoting goals formed in a specific place, thus leading to decreases in protective behaviour and increases in sexual risk (Bouton 2002; Fisher 2008; Zimmerman and Connor 1989). Given that health norms and social identities can change from place to place, interventions impervious to context represent promising avenues of health promotion among mobile populations.…”

Ecological Models Revisited: Their Uses and Evolution in Health Promotion Over Two Decades

“…Integrating and conceptualizing the environment amid other influences on behavior are key features of ecological models (17) that have been applied in public health discourse. In particular, in an effort to disentangle and highlight the complex pattern of relationships between individuals/populations and their environments, health-promotion and public health researchers have stratified the environment into various levels of influences to allow for an initial foray into the issue of levels of analysis.…”

Using a Health Belief Model to investigate the walking behaviour of residents living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“…The most basic factor that influences individual behaviour has been found to occur at the intrapersonal level (Rimer andGlanz 2005, Shores et al 2007). People's behaviour is influenced through the intrapersonal factors which are reflected by their surroundings (Fisher 2008). Examples of intrapersonal characteristics that influence people's behaviour include: knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and personality traits (Robinson 2008).…”