Settings for Health Promotion

Much of what makes people healthy or sick - income, social position, where people live and work, their level of literacy, culture and political system - lies outside the direct scope of activities targeting individuals. To capture this complexity, health promotion actions require a shift from disease prevention, focused on messages about risk and the required behavioural change, to an ecological, salutogenic approach that considers the social, environmental, and cultural settings in which people live, work, recreate and play such as cities, communities, families, schools, work- and recreation places. In line with complexity thinking, a setting is defined as a place or social context in which people engage in daily activities and where environmental, organisational and personal factors influence and are influenced by health and well-being. Settings may provide opportunities as well as constraints for the promotion of health and well-being. In this course, students apply the settings perspective to analyse a health promotion issue within a specific setting, which may include families or households, communities, educational settings, work – and recreational places. Real-life cases are used to provide students with relevant, concrete experiences with the settings approach.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• understand ways to conceptualize, frame and solve health problems and how health and social problems and related interventions come to be framed (and by whom) and the power asymmetries that arise;
• understand theory about the relationship between context and health promotion interventions, and how conceptions of context and settings intersect and differ;
• theory and methods in the field of Health Promotion by means of analysing a setting and designing solutions for it;
• determine general and specific features of different settings;
• identify meaningful and motivating resources for life within different settings;
• collaboratively (in a group) develop and execute a settings based research project (case study) commissioned by a client external to the university;
• develop the competence to provide constructive feedback to improve other people’s and personal work;
• develop creative, self-regulated as well as collective learning competences.

Assumed Knowledge:
Basic principles of health promotion, recommended: CPT38006 Science Communication 2.0: Dialogue and Transdiscipinarity; HSO31806 Social Inequalities in Health; HSO30306 Health Policy and Action and Society and HSO20306 Environmental Assets for Health.