Understanding and Improving Health within Settings and Organisations

In our day-to-day lives, different organisations and settings (such as schools and workplaces) shape our life chances and the kinds of physical and social environments that we are exposed to. These affect our behaviour and they also play an important part in shaping how we see ourselves, and how other people see us. We want to understand these social processes better so that we can develop new interventions to improve people’s health and well-being. We then want to do careful scientific studies that tell us whether these interventions work. We will check too whether these attract and help the people who can benefit most (for example, men or women, or people from less advantaged backgrounds).

We will work in some settings that almost everyone has some experience of in their lives (such as primary and secondary schools, and workplaces) and in other settings (such as prisons) where there is a chance to develop and assess interventions for people who are often very difficult to reach. We will also try to think of new ways to make health improvement programmes available to people and enjoyable for them. To do this we will work in settings such as professional sports clubs (for example, professional football or rugby clubs) that are familiar or especially attractive to the people that the programme is designed for.

Aims and objectives

The organisations in which people live, work and interact hold immense potential for public health gain: the challenge is to understand how best to harness this opportunity for health improvement. The aim of this programme, is to understand settings and organisations as contexts for:
• influencing social position and identity, behaviour, health and well-being; and
• facilitating health improvement through the development, piloting and evaluation of new interventions and/or adaptations of existing interventions to novel settings.

Our objectives are:
1. To understand how the physical, social and virtual settings and organisations in which people live, interact and engage:
a. (re)produce social status and identity (with a particular focus on gender);
b. determine exposures to physical, psychosocial, cultural and organisational environments that influence health and well-being across the life course;
c. facilitate or constrain opportunities for intervention and positive health practices;
d. extend reach to particular groups.
2. To develop partnerships with academic, education, industry, health policy, and other, stakeholders to (co)develop and evaluate interventions with potential to improve human health and well-being, and contribute to social and behaviour change theory.

Research plan and methodology

Following careful social science research on organisations’ influence on social status, identity and exposures to health-damaging or salutogenic factors (and the opportunities and constraints these present for individual and organisational change), this programme will develop settings-based interventions for health gain and evaluate whether and how they are successful and sustainable.

The programme will conduct multidisciplinary research, integrating sociological, biomedical, psychological and anthropological science with models of behaviour change and intervention development, focused initially on four key settings: educational; professional sporting organisations; secure institutions; and workplaces.

The interventions we will develop and/or evaluate will include those targeting individual behaviour change (where the setting presents a convenient or appealing way to reach particular individuals) through to those effecting health gain through change at the organisational level. We aim to use this learning to develop generalisable models to facilitate health improvement within organisational settings. We will use a range of qualitative and quantitative methods and disciplinary perspectives to generate understandings on the influence of settings and organisations on health and health behaviour. We will in turn develop and evaluate multilevel, translational interventions to improve health and reduce inequalities. We will seek to develop interventions that work across the four supra-individual levels of the socio-ecological framework (relationships, settings, neighbourhoods and policy); novel research made possible by the Unit’s integrated cross-programme working.