An Analysis of the Structural Factors Affecting the Public Participation in Health Promotion.

Mojgan Dastoury,Tayebe Aminee,Akram Aminaee,Raheleh Ghaumi

doi:10.5539/gjhs.v8n8p94

Abstract

The present study focuses on analyzing national and international Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) studies published from 2000 to 2012 in order to identify and categorize the possible factors that affect social participation for improving the public health. Clearly, improving the public health necessitates a combination of the participation and responsibility by the social members and the attempts by public health policy-makers and planners. CBPR studies are selected as the corpus since they seek to encourage active and informed participation of the social members in fulfilling the health related goals. The present study is conducted through meta-synthesis within a qualitative framework. The results revealed a set of factors within the structural capacities which were employed by the CBPR researchers for achieving the health promotion goals. The structural capacities employed in the interventions could be considered on the cultural and social grounds. The cultural grounds were divided into scientific and religious attempts. For the scientific attempts, the results highlighted the participation of higher education institutes including universities and research centers as well as educational institutes such as schools and the relevant institutions. And regarding the religious attempts, the results indicated that the cooptation of religious centers played the greatest role in enhancing the public participation.

Highlights

1.1 Statement of the ProblemToday, the developed countries try to address health promotion at the same level as the disease prevention through the health care systems which might indicate to the increasing significance of this field
The results revealed a set of factors within the structural capacities which were employed by the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) researchers for achieving the health promotion goals
The analysis of the data obtained in this study indicated that the CBPR researchers share relatively common definitions of public participation in health promotion practices

Summary

Introduction

The sociological approach introduces concepts such as healthy city, healthy village, healthy society, and health promoting schools as the fundamental concepts It necessitates the immediate engagement of the governments in providing convenient health care services for different social classes and taking actions enhancing community members' management and decision making skills for leading a healthier lifestyle. These could be considered as health promotion goals to be fulfilled, for societies such as Iran where the health promotion field is dominated by the medical approach. Obtaining the defined goals in health promotion field requires, on the one hand, the commitment of the government for investing greater energy and funds in the relevant practices, and on the other hand, the awareness of the target individuals about how to intervene in public www.ccsenet.org/gjhs

Methods

Results

Conclusion