The conditions for health
Healthy eating, physical activity, and other health behaviors develop within social relationships, organizations, policies, and physical environments. Our goal is to understand how those conditions can change to prevent chronic disease and improve community well-being.
Human ecology provides the foundation: people act within systems, and their collective actions can reshape those systems. Community psychology brings attention to participation, power, and the resources people can mobilize together.
Organizing for change
We examine how community organizing, coalitions, and social movements build shared priorities, circulate knowledge, and influence decisions. The research asks when local relationships and efforts contribute to broader changes in policy, organizational practice, and the environments that support health.
These processes are shaped by who participates, whose knowledge counts, how resources are distributed, and whether institutions respond to community priorities.
Making prevention work
Implementation science connects this understanding of collective action with the use of evidence-informed prevention strategies. We study how organizations and community systems select, adapt, adopt, and sustain strategies within changing local conditions.
In FICAS, this means developing and testing network interventions to support community coalition adoption of prevention strategies. Councils and potential partners can find study information at ficasstudy.com.
Connecting methods and mechanisms
Social network analysis examines relationships, influence, and diffusion. Participatory systems mapping brings community knowledge into explanations of change. Agent-based and system dynamics models help examine feedback, adaptation, and how individual actions can produce collective outcomes.
We integrate these approaches with qualitative and quantitative evidence to develop and test explanations of what changes, through which mechanisms, and under what conditions. Models inform questions and decisions; they do not substitute for community knowledge or empirical evaluation.
- How do organizing and social movements change the conditions that support health?
- Which relationships and implementation strategies help communities put prevention evidence into practice?
- How do local actions spread, accumulate, or encounter resistance across systems?
- Who benefits from change, and how can community priorities shape its direction?