Health promotion research. Towards a new social epidemiology

A collection of twenty-one state-of-the-art reviews illustrating the ways in which research in the social sciences can improve understanding of the social determinants of health and disease and shape policies that promote health. Examples of specific interventions and their results are also provided.
The book has five main parts. The first part focuses on strategies for improving public health policy. Articles describe various methodological and conceptual approaches that can be used to assess problems, identify risk factors, guide policy choices, and test programmes of health promotion. Articles in the second part, focused on social and behavioural factors, discuss the links between economic status and disease and consider the extent to which stress, coping styles, social supports, and lifestyle factors will influence individual differences in susceptibility to disease.
Papers in the third part explore the ways in which families, workplaces, and hospitals can serve as settings for communicating health messages and promoting healthy practices. Population-oriented health promotion is assessed in the fourth part, which considers how policies should be changed to meet the special needs of women, the unemployed, the elderly, and the chronically ill. The book concludes with a discussion of the role of community-based action in health promotion, including information on the outcome of various European programmes for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases and on the contribution of voluntary organizations and self-help groups.