Welcome and Setting the Stage (audio)
Organizing Committee Chairs
Ronald Abeles, PhD
Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, NIH
(audio)
Suzanne Heurtin-Roberts, PhD, MSW
National Cancer Institute, NIH
(audio)

Public Policy & Health
Moderator: Marguerite Ro, DrPH (APIAHF)
(audio)

The goal of these presentations is to demonstrate the actual and potential contributions of behavioral and social sciences (BSS) research to informing policy so as to reduce or eliminate health disparities. For the purposes of this session, we define policy as measures employed by governments and other institutions to influence the function and well-being of individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole. This goal requires presentations to:

• Present BSS research that examines the relationship between policy variation or change and health disparities or the health of low SES groups; and
  
• Demonstrate the pathways through which policy does or could influence health disparities, including those at higher levels (e.g. community safety, housing standards) and those at individual and biological levels of analysis (e.g., individual and family resources, stress).

Panel 2: Health policy and health disparities

This panel begins with two talks addressing programs and policy areas that specifically focus on improving health outcomes and concludes with a summary overview of the health implications of policies, including those directly and indirectly related to health.

Prevention of Disease and Disability
Moderator: David Takeuchi, PhD - University of Washington
(audio)

For the purposes of this conference, we may define prevention research as studies of interventions at the individual, group or community level to provide targeted audiences the knowledge and skills to avert or minimize health risks. Consequently, the emphasis is on “translational” research in the pragmatic sense of taking basic social science findings about how humans behave individually and in groups and putting them to work in communities. Each speaker will address the tensions between targeted interventions and universal ones, and between generic approaches to “health” and focused programs on a particular problem. Then a final speaker will address the challenges to program fidelity inherent in scaling up for public health use.

3:00 PM |

Introduction by the Moderator
Lee Hargraves, PhD
University of Massachusetts, Medical Center
(audio)