By Nathaniel Counts
With the coordination and additional funding afforded by the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council and the Prevention and Public Health Fund under the Affordable Care Act, scholars may have a unique opportunity to work toward an epidemiological definition of community. The evaluation and record-keeping components of the different interventions will inevitably lead to a great deal of additional information about individuals, including their beliefs, behaviors, and health, over time. If one’s behaviors, and in particular the Leading Health Indicators (ten factors chosen by Health and Human Services that contribute to health, including substance abuse, exercise levels, condom use, etc.) and health status are determined in part by social signaling, it may be possible to use this data to determine which individuals seem to be part of a community. Various environmental, and possibly even genetic, factors could be controlled for to find groups of individuals whose Leading Health Indicators affect one another’s, and whose health statuses are linked. This grouping would be a functional “community,” a group of people who influence one another, whether they realize it or not. Currently, the notion of community is usually defined geographically – your community are those that are close to you, unless it is a city, in which case your community are those who are nearby of similar socioeconomic class. This method would allow for greater precision in determining groups that influence another.
A more precise understanding of community would be useful for assessing the impact of interventions, public health or otherwise. If you can see the initial community structures at the beginning of an intervention, you could target the individual communities for change and see how their Leading Health Indicators and health statuses evolve. You could also, and more importantly, see how an intervention changes the make-up of a community. A new basketball program in a local gymnasium will bring together different arrangements of individuals, who may in turn influence one another, joining them into a community and linking their health statuses. This could determine choices of programs – a youth basketball league will shape communities differently than a family program or an adult program, and conscious choices could be made about how to bin people based on their current risk behaviors. This type of information could also provide caution to those planning any sort of intervention – any interaction could reshape communities, subtly changing individual’s values and even their health in ways unbeknownst to them and unintended by the intervener.
