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This chapter examines positive adjustment and resilience as an asset, which can promote good health, even in adverse conditions. It presents a number of different models that have been put forward to explain how resilience works; compensatory, protective and challenge. Resilience is not a constant but is something moulded and shaped by the physical and social environment. Some people, depending on...
During the past century the health of children and adolescents has improved radically in Western industrialised countries due to improvements in nutrition and infection control. Today, however, children and adolescents in Western industrialised countries are more likely to suffer from problems related to mental health concerns such as social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The chapter will...
This chapter discusses problems with existing attempts to measure children’s well-being using secondary datasets, taking as an example the UNICEF Innocenti report entitled Child Poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries (2007). The report placed UK’s children at the bottom of the league table of rich nations on their average score across six dimensions, including...
This chapter explores the strength of “social cohesion” both as an individual and community asset. There is a growing body of evidence that supports the link between strong social capital and its beneficial impact on health, although the authors stress that social capital is, in itself, not a panacea and will not put right the detrimental impact of extreme poverty and deprivation. The authors suggest...
Historically, approaches to the promotion of population health have been based on a deficit model. That is, they tend to focus on identifying the problems and needs of populations that require professional resources and high levels of dependence on hospital and welfare services. These deficit models are important and necessary to identify levels of needs and priorities. But they need to be complemented...
The understanding of any societal health discourse is a complex question involving history, macro-politics, socioeconomic development, culture and traditions of both individual nations and continents as a whole. Interdisciplinary research has a history over the past century involving most social sciences and especially educational sciences supported by many scientists, intellectuals and organisations...
In this chapter a theory that describes the assets that help to protect health is presented. Assets, and their opposite – the conditions which create vulnerabilities to ill health – are located in the lifeworlds of ordinary human experience and the health benefits and disbenefits which accumulate over the life course. The lifeworld and lifecourse together are the bridge between social structure and...
Policy makers have tended to create hierarchical systems where a small number of people are in charge of the mass production of standardised goods. Clients/consumers in large numbers grow dependent on this cycle of production. Such systems create dependency rather than empowerment. The author argues that in creating maps to reflect the way in which these systems work we have tended to neglect the...
The chapter is focused mainly on the intervention research and evaluation of actions aimed at strengthening and supporting health assets as a way of producing healthy communities and individuals. There is a need to re-think traditional assumptions related to evaluating the effectiveness of health interventions aimed at strengthening health assets as opposed to eliminating or curing diseases. Working...
Hungary is entering a new phase of public health development. The challenges of facing the social and health impact of the economic and financial crisis require redressing of the balance between the assets and deficit models for evidence based public health. A greater focus on assets based approaches could help unlock some of the existing barriers to effective action on health inequities. Hungary...
This chapter argues that societies that support and produce governments with a commitment to equity will be characterised by high levels of social capital including social cohesion. Commitment to action on the social determinants of health to increase equity in health status requires a proactive policy approach from governments and that governments demonstrating this proactivity will be those that...
This chapter looks at how internal and external assets relate to the mental health and health behaviour of Romanian adolescents. Data from the Health Behaviour of School-Aged children survey is used to measure mental health status against indices of school social capital. Results demonstrate that changes in family structure, parenting patterns and the easy availability of unhealthy lifestyle options...
This chapter provides an overview of the salutogenic approach to public health challenges. The origin of the theory of salutogenises stems from the narratives of the survivors of the Holocaust. It was further developed into a life-orientation theory and a model. Based on interviews with people who had survived this horror, a valid and reliable instrument was constructed, the “Sense of Coherence”...
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