This paper presents a framework to explore the relationship between health equity and community empowerment. It traces the progression of the concept of participation to the present term of empowerment and the links among empowerment, equity, and health outcomes. It argues that the relationship can best be described by using the acronym CHOICE (Capacity-building, Human rights, Organizational su...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to determine whether patient activation is a changing or changeable characteristic and to assess whether changes in activation also are accompanied by changes in health behavior. STUDY METHODS To obtain variability in activation and self-management behavior, a controlled trial with chronic disease patients randomized into either intervention or control c...

BACKGROUND Although health outcomes may have fundamentally nonlinear relationships with relevant behavioral, psychological, cognitively, or biological predictors, most analytical models assume a linear relationship. Furthermore, some health outcomes may have multimodal distributions, but most statistical models in common use assume a unimodal, normal distribution. Suitable nonlinear models shou...

This paper reviews the literature on how empowerment can lead to an improvement in the health status of an individual, group, or community. There is a broad body of literature on empowerment, and this review has been designed to identify material, particularly case studies, that can be included within the following 'empowerment domains': Participation; Community-based organizations; Local leade...

Recent efforts to promote child survival and development internationally have focused new attention on the importance of the household as a mediator of both environmental risks and programmatic interventions to promote better health. In this paper, we introduce a theoretical framework, the 'developmental niche,' derived from studies of children's behavior and development in different cultural c...

There is currently much interest in conducting spatial analyses of health outcomes at the small-area scale. This requires sophisticated statistical techniques, usually involving Bayesian models, to smooth the underlying risk estimates because the data are typically sparse. However, questions have been raised about the performance of these models for recovering the "true" risk surface, about the...

Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by exploiting both inheritances and lottery winnings to test a theory of health behavior. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value of health lost) of unhealthy consumption. The health cost increases with wealth and the degree of unhealthiness, leading wealth...

Socioeconomic status (SES) has powerful and complex impacts on health, and understanding the relationship between SES and health is essential for long-term improvements in the health of populations. In addition, in the United States, the impact of SES on health is inextricably intertwined with racial and ethnicity status and the historical development and maintenance of health disparities. Most...

Introduction The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) established the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS) in 2009 to facilitate national estimates of chronic disease prevalence, incidence, and health outcomes. The CCDSS uses population-based linked health administrative databases from all provinces/territories (P/Ts) and a distributed analytic protocol to produce standardized ...