Community Health- Public Health Research Methods and Practice

Abstract

For few decades the value of a community, empowerment, community-based care, population-based needs assessment was discussed, but not so much of the evidence of this commitment was found in the public health interventions. Potential contributions from the social sciences tend to be overwhelmed by the appeal of the biomedical and behavioural sciences. Three concepts and notions notion of community in public health were dominated: First, community- a lots and lots of people or community as the population; second could be described as community as “giant reinforcement schedule” or community as setting, with aspects of that setting being used as levers to support and maintain individual behaviour change. The third, newest, approach sees community as “eco-system with capacity to work towards solutions to its own community identified problems” or to see it as a social system. This notion of community focused 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 contributed to this shift in perception of the value of the community. In this course we elaborate inequity research, “System” study of communities and present case study: „Community applied research in Croatia- “triggered” by Healthy Cities“.