Multilevel Thinking and Life Course Perspectives Inform Public Health Practice: A Public Health of Consequence November 2018

摘要

The science of population health and the practice of public health rest heavily on empiricism: they draw on data from research to explicate what affects population health and to inform public health practitioners of what to do to improve public health. To this end, science’s role is front and center, as it should be, and with science we can build the programs of and actions taken by public health. We sometimes, perhaps inadvertently, downplay or minimize the role of theory in how we think about what influences population health and how we should approach these influences. Despite some excellent work articulating the theories that could guide our work in population health science,1 much of our scholarship and practice remains explicitly atheoretical: we publish on what we observe; we do what we think works.