Structural interventions: concepts, challenges and opportunities for research

KM Blankenship, SR Friedman, S Dworkin… - Journal of Urban …, 2006 - Springer
Journal of Urban Health, 2006Springer
Structural interventions refer to public health interventions that promote health by altering the
structural context within which health is produced and reproduced. They draw on concepts
from multiple disciplines, including public health, psychiatry, and psychology, in which
attention to interventions is common, and sociology and political economy, where structure
is a familiar, if contested, concept. This has meant that even as discussions of structural
interventions bring together researchers from various fields, they can get stalled in debates …
Abstract
Structural interventions refer to public health interventions that promote health by altering the structural context within which health is produced and reproduced. They draw on concepts from multiple disciplines, including public health, psychiatry, and psychology, in which attention to interventions is common, and sociology and political economy, where structure is a familiar, if contested, concept. This has meant that even as discussions of structural interventions bring together researchers from various fields, they can get stalled in debates over definitions. In this paper, we seek to move these discussions forward by highlighting a number of critical issues raised by structural interventions, and the subsequent implications of these for research.
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