1 Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
2 Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
Health Educ Behav. 2017 Oct;44(5):815-819. doi: 10.1177/1090198117728548.
Most public health researchers and practitioners agree that we need to accelerate our efforts to eliminate health disparities and promote health equity. The past two decades of research have provided a wealth of descriptive studies, both qualitative and quantitative, that describe the size, scale, and scope of health disparities, as well as the key determinants that affect disparities. We need, however, to shift more aggressively to action informed by this research and develop deeper understandings of how to shape multilevel interventions, influenced by theories across multiple levels of the social-ecologic framework. In this article, we discuss the promising opportunities for qualitative and health equity scholars to advance research and practice through the refinement, expansion, and application of rigorous, theoretically informed qualitative research. In particular, to advance work in the area of theory to inform health equity, we encourage researchers (a) to move toward thinking about mechanisms and theory-building and refining; (b) to explicitly incorporate theories at the social, organizational, community, and policy levels and consider how factors at these levels interact synergistically with factors at the individual and interpersonal levels;
大多数公共卫生研究人员和从业者都认为，我们需要加快努力，消除健康差距，促进健康公平。过去二十年的研究提供了大量描述性研究，包括定性和定量研究，描述了健康差距的规模、范围和程度，以及影响差距的关键决定因素。然而，我们需要更积极地将这一研究转化为行动，并加深对如何塑造多层次干预措施的理解，这些干预措施受到社会生态框架多个层面理论的影响。在本文中，我们讨论了定性和健康公平学者通过完善、扩展和应用严格的、理论上有依据的定性研究来推进研究和实践的有希望的机会。特别是，为了推动理论在健康公平领域的工作，我们鼓励研究人员：(a) 转向思考机制和理论建设和完善；(b) 明确纳入社会、组织、社区和政策层面的理论，并考虑这些层面的因素如何与个人和人际层面的因素协同作用。
