Community-based research in public health focuses on social, structural, and physical environmental inequities through active involvement of community members, organizational representatives, and researchers in all aspects of the research process. Partners contribute their expertise to enhance understanding of a given phenomenon and to integrate the knowledge gained with action to benefit the community involved. This review provides a synthesis of key principles of community-based research, examines its place within the context of different scientific paradigms, discusses rationales for its use, and explores major challenges and facilitating factors and their implications for conducting effective community-based research aimed at improving the public’s health.

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Review of community-based research: assessing partnership approaches to improve public health.

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A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology: conceptual models, empirical challenges and interdisciplinary perspectives

PART I - BACKGROUND 1. Introduction 2. The life course and adult chronic disease: an historical perspective with particular reference to coronary heart disease PART II - LIFE COURSE INFLUENCES ON ADULT CHRONIC DISEASE 3. Pre-adult influences on cardiovascular disease 4. Life course approaches to socioeconomic differentials in health 5. Ischaemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease mortality trends with special reference to England and Wales: are there cohort effects? 6. Geography and migration with special reference to cardiovascular disease 7. A life course approach to diabetes 8. A life course approach to obesity 9. A life course approach to blood pressure 10. A life course approach to respiratory and allergic diseases 11. A life course approach to cancer epidemiology 12. Time trends in cancer incidence and mortality 13. A life course approach to biological ageing 14. A life course approach to neuropsychiatric outcomes PART III - BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL PROCESSES 15. Fetal growth and development: the role of nutrition and other factors 16. Socioeconomic pathways between childhood and adult health PART IV - IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND FUTURE RESEARCH 17. Should we intervene to improve fetal and infant growth? 18. Should we intervene to improve childhood circumstances? 19. Conclusions

A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology

PURPOSE—Interest in the effects of neighbourhood or local area social characteristics on health has increased in recent years, but to date the existing evidence has not been systematically reviewed. Multilevel or contextual analyses of social factors and health represent a possible reconciliation between two divergent epidemiological paradigms—individual risk factor epidemiology and an ecological approach.
DATA SOURCES—Keyword searching of Index Medicus (Medline) and additional references from retrieved articles.
STUDY SELECTION—All original studies of the effect of local area social characteristics on individual health outcomes, adjusted for individual socioeconomic status, published in English before 1 June 1998 and focused on populations in developed countries.
DATA SYNTHESIS—The methodological challenges posed by the design and interpretation of multilevel studies of local area effects are discussed and results summarised with reference to type of health outcome. All but two of the 25 reviewed studies reported a statistically significant association between at least one measure of social environment and a health outcome (contextual effect), after adjusting for individual level socioeconomic status (compositional effect). Contextual effects were generally modest and much smaller than compositional effects.
CONCLUSIONS—The evidence for modest neighbourhood effects on health is fairly consistent despite heterogeneity of study designs, substitution of local area measures for neighbourhood measures and probable measurement error. By drawing public health attention to the health risks associated with the social structure and ecology of neighbourhoods, innovative approaches to community level interventions may ensue.


Keywords: socioeconomic status; local area; contextual analysis; hierarchical analysis

https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/55/2/111.full.pdf

Multilevel Analyses of Neighbourhood Socioeconomic Context and Health Outcomes: a Critical Review

https://www.jhsph.edu/research/affiliated-programs/baltimore-neighborhood-research-consortium/Research_Libr/Macintyre2002.pdf

Place effects on health: how can we conceptualise, operationalise and measure them?

Part I of this paper traced the evolution of modern epidemiology in terms of three eras, each with its dominant paradigm, culminating in the present era of chronic disease epidemiology with its paradigm, the black box. This paper sees the close of the present era and foresees a new era of eco-epidemiology in which the deployment of a different paradigm will be crucial. Here a paradigm is advocated for the emergent era. Encompassing many levels of organization--molecular and societal as well as individual--this paradigm, termed Chinese boxes, aims to integrate more than a single level in design, analysis, and interpretation. Such a paradigm could sustain and refine a public health-oriented epidemiology. But preventing a decline of creative epidemiology in this new era will require more than a cogent scientific paradigm. Attention will have to be paid to the social processes that foster a cohesive and humane discipline.

E Susser

Papers

Choosing a future for epidemiology: II. From black box to Chinese boxes and eco-epidemiology.