Health and well-being are created and developed everywhere and throughout life – both in and outside the healthcare system. Health is created where people live, learn, work and are together in environments that allow them to take care of each other, make healthy choices and maintain their meaning and manageability in their own lives.

Many factors play into population health and wellbeing. Every individual person is a part of a family, a community, a set of organisations and institutions, an overlapping and complex network of media and political landscapes, and a broader societal structure. Each of these layers of factors affect each individual’s development and access to resources. Moreover, meaningful opportunities for intervention and action to support individual and population health should account for all of these layers, and the complex interplays between them.

This is what we focus on and study in the research group.

Research areas

Our research themes include:

• Development, implementation, and evaluation of health interventions and health promotion strategies using complex systems approaches
• Family perspectives: Giving children the best starts in life, by engaging not only children themselves in research and intervention development but also their parents, siblings, and extended families
• Lifecourse perspective: Attending to what life stage a person is in (e.g. middle childhood versus adolescence versus middle adulthood) because different environmental factors have different individual and network effects, depending on age and life stage.
• Health literacy: Supporting health literacy (i.e., basic understandings of: human biology and indicators of good and poor health, barriers and enablers to health, and health systems) is a key strategy known to promote individual and family health and improve population health
• Physical literacy: Supporting physical literacy (i.e., embodied understanding of how to move your body in diverse ways and under diverse conditions in ways supportive of individual health and wellbeing) is also a key strategy known to promote individual and family health and improve population health
• Health promotion outcomes: Identifying or developing metrics that enable evaluation of population health changes in response to health promotion efforts and interventions
• Health behaviours: Highlighting the significance of sets of health behaviours, like getting sufficient sleep and eating a well-balanced diet, for the health of not only individuals but also families, neighbourhoods, and broader communities
• Marginalized groups and people living with additional vulnerabilities: Attending to the health needs, barriers, enablers, knowledge, and structures for people living with extra risks and vulnerabilities, particularly poverty/ low socio-economic position and/or stigmas associated with being from an ethno-linguistic, racialized, disabled, sexual, and/or gender minority group.