engleski

Community Health - Public Health Research Methods and Practice

For few decades, the value of a community, empowerment, community-based care, population-based needs assessment was discussed, but not so much evidence of this commitement was found in the public health interventions. Potential contribution from the social scineces tend to be overhelmed by the appeal of the biomedical and behavioral science. Three concepts and notions of community in public health were dominated: first, community as the lots and lots of people, or comminity as the population ; second community as a "giant reinforcement schedule" or community as setting, with aspects of that setting being used as levels to support and maintein individual behaviour change. The third, newest, approach sees the community as "eco-system with capacity to work towards soulutions to its own community identified problems" or to see it as a social system. This notion of community focuses on strengths instead merely on deficits. Two groups of research activities (systematic study of communities and inequality research) supported with evidence from many applied researches done through development of European Healthy Cities Project have contributed to the shift in perception of the value of the community. In this paper we elaborate inequity research, system study of communities and present community applied research in Croatia "triggered" by Healthy Cities.

community health, public health research methods

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