School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA, USA.
School of Public Administration, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
Glob Public Health. 2021 Apr;16(4):517-531. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2020.1814834. Epub 2020 Sep 9.
Many claims are made concerning which issues are on the global health agenda and which are neglected. Scholarship is inconsistent and generally vague about how an issue's status is (or should be) measured, however, leaving such claims open to questions about their validity. This inquiry explores a novel way of addressing the largely overlooked matter of how to comparatively assess the agenda status of health issues systematically, over time and in consideration of a global health context that lacks centralised authority. We draw upon a model from sociology which proposes that collective definitions of social problems and public attention evolve in multiple, interacting institutional arenas, each of which has the capacity to give robust attention to a limited number of issues. We systematically track status indicators for two significant global health issues, diabetes and oral diseases, in three arenas since 2000. Oral health's status declined while diabetes rose in international representation, international organisation and scientific research arenas during the past decade. This article sets out some preliminary contours of an analytical approach that holds promise for enhancing understanding of causal mechanisms and outcomes across a wider set of global health issues and agenda setting arenas.
许多说法涉及哪些问题在全球卫生议程上，哪些问题被忽视。然而，学术研究在如何衡量一个问题的地位（或应该如何衡量）方面不一致且通常含糊不清，这使得这些说法容易受到其有效性的质疑。本研究探讨了一种新颖的方法，可以解决在缺乏集中权威的全球卫生背景下，如何系统地、随着时间的推移以及考虑到健康问题的全球卫生背景来比较评估卫生问题议程地位的这一在很大程度上被忽视的问题。我们借鉴社会学中的一个模型，该模型提出，社会问题的集体定义和公众关注度在多个相互作用的制度领域中演变，每个领域都有能力关注数量有限的问题。自 2000 年以来，我们在三个领域中系统地跟踪了两个重大全球卫生问题（糖尿病和口腔疾病）的地位指标。在过去十年中，口腔健康在国际代表性、国际组织和科学研究领域的地位下降，而糖尿病的地位上升。本文阐述了一种分析方法的一些初步轮廓，该方法有望增强对更广泛的全球卫生问题和议程制定领域的因果机制和结果的理解。
