Penelope Hawe
Biographic Data
| ID | 116302 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Penelope Hawe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Penelope |
| FAMILY NAME | Hawe |
| SIGNATURE | HAWE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2397-867X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 406 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Icing or cake? Grant competitions as a model for funding chronic disease prevention in Tasmania, Australia
Competitive grant funding is a well-established mechanism for generating activity and interventions in the field of chronic disease prevention. Yet grant competitions may be burdensome for organizations, and money may not be enough to bring about lasting change in communities. In this study, we explore the dynamics of awarding and receiving money in the context of a state-level government grant competition to support community organizations and p…
Sydney's ‘last drinks’ laws
Soft infrastructure
Processes of health promotion funding, and even standard processes of program scale-up and readiness assessment, risk underestimating the range of resources that are fundamental for community health improvement, particularly among disadvantaged communities. Funders should design ways to resource communities so that there is constant attention to and coaching of critically important diverse processes of resource growth, independent of program-spec…
Adapting interventions to new contexts—the Adapt guidance
Implementing interventions with a previous evidence base in new contexts might be more efficient than developing new interventions for each context. Although some interventions transfer well, effectiveness and implementation often depend on the context. Achieving a good fit between intervention and context then requires careful and systematic adaptation. This paper presents new evidence and consensus informed guidance for adapting and transferrin…
Can adaptation to ‘extraordinary’ times teach us about ways to strengthen community-based chronic disease prevention? Insights from the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-I9 pandemic represents a massive challenge to the ordinary work of community-based organisations. We present results from a study of the actions and experiences of community-based organisations and funding agencies in the context of a grants program for chronic disease prevention in Tasmania, Australia during 2020. Community-based organisations had just received funding to implement programs targeting smoking, obesity, nutrition and phy…
The Weight of Words
Co-production partnerships between policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are designed to facilitate production of relevant and readily usable research in health policy and practice contexts. We describe methodological strategies for in-depth collaborative analysis based on a co-produced ethnography of health promotion practice, involving ethnographic researchers and government-based research partners. We draw on a co-production dialogue to…
Can an electronic monitoring system capture implementation of health promotion programs? A focussed ethnographic exploration of the story behind program monitoring data
While monitoring systems cannot and should not capture every aspect of implementation, better accounting for aspects of context and "extra" work involved in program implementation could help illuminate why implementation succeeds or fails. Failure to do so may result in policy makers drawing false conclusions about what is required to achieve implementation targets. Practitioners, as experts of context, are well placed to assist policy makers to …
Resources, relationships, and systems thinking should inform the way community health promotion is funded
Public health agencies tasked with improving the health of communities are poorly supported by many ‘business-as-usual’ funding practices. It is commonplace to call for more funding for health promotion, but additional funding could do more harm than good if, at the same time, we do not critically examine the micro-processes that lead to health enablement – micro-processes that are instigated or amplified by funding. We are currently engaged in a…
Old’ tools in a new era
As health promotion as a field progresses further into the 21st century, it may seem backward-looking to devote research energy to the study of health information leaflets and program resources. However, the longevity of these tools in health promotion invites more critical understanding of their roles and meanings, particularly now in the era of scaled-up evidence-based programs. As program implementation becomes more complex, it is vital that w…
Evidence suggests a need to rethink social capital and social capital interventions
Mock abstracts with mock findings
Background: A number of ways to conduct research are designed to maximise the likelihood that evidence from research is quickly transferred into practice. This includes action research and partnership research between researchers and policy makers. Such approaches focus research effort on questions of highest relevance to practice and policy so as to create ownership of the results. However, such approaches on their own do not necessarily visuali…
Research on media framing of public policies to prevent chronic disease
Communicating the benefits of population health interventions
How can we communicate to the public that population level health interventions are effective at improving health? Perhaps the most familiar "currency" of effect is that which can be brought about via medication. Comparisons of effect sizes may be effective ways of communicating the benefits of population health interventions if they are seen and understood in the same way that medications are. We developed a series of comparisons to communicate …
The need for a complex systems model of evidence for public health
Does citizen science have the capacity to transform population health science
Citizen science engages members of the public in research design, data collection, and analysis – in asking and answering questions about the world around them. The United States, European Union, and Australia have placed citizen science at the forefront of national science policy. Journals such as Science, Nature and Bioscience regularly feature projects conducted by citizens. Citizen science engages millions of people worldwide. However, to dat…
Lessons from Complex Interventions to Improve Health
Complexity—resulting from interactions among many component parts—is a property of both the intervention and the context (or system) into which it is placed. Complexity increases the unpredictability of effects. Complexity invites new approaches to logic modeling, definitions of integrity and means of standardization, and evaluation. New metaphors and terminology are needed to capture the recognition that knowledge generation comes from the hands…
Replication of a whole school ethos-changing intervention
A non-specific, risk protective intervention in the social environment of the school had a significant impact on a cluster of risk behaviours for girls. Results were remarkably like reports from similar school environment interventions elsewhere, albeit with different behaviours being affected. It may be that this type of intervention activates change processes that interact highly with context, impacting different risks differently, according to…
Comparison communities in a cluster randomised trial innovate in response to ‘being controlled
Minimal, negligible and negligent interventions
All That Glitters
Currently, Canada’s northern territories have three active diamond mines and one mine under construction, and one mine has recently closed. In response to local concerns, and in partnership with members of the Tłįchǫ First Nation, this ethnographic study examines the positive and detrimental impacts of diamond mining on youth in Behchokǫ, Northwest Territories, using data collected from intensive fieldwork and participant observation, focus group…
Response from the Authors
We apologize for the error in our paper and we thank the authors of the Letter to the Editor for pointing it out.The study was part of a PhD dissertation and the full report of this work (published in 2007) accurately denotes "Tch" throughout (Davison, 2007).In the process of drafting and updating the work for this paper, we referred to the Tch Government website (www.tlicho.ca)for guidance on current spelling."Tch" appears there extensively as v…
The truth, but not the whole truth? Call for an amnesty on unreported results of public health interventions
Lack of time, funds or other resources are the explanations that have been given by clinical researchers for failure to publish all the results of large randomised trials.1 It has been estimated that 40–62% of trials have introduced new variables into the study and/or omitted others.2 This insight has been gained by comparing trial protocols with publications. The International Clinical Trials Registry Platform was established in response to such…
Frequently Asked Questions About Population Health Intervention Research
Understanding Interdisciplinary Collaborations as Social Networks
The dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration invite further investigation if we are to make this endeavour more rewarding and productive. We are using social network analysis to track the development of a new interdisciplinary collaboration on complex interventions to improve population health. It involves nineteen scholars across four countries. We report the Baseline network of formal relationships among the scholars, along with the impact o…
How are community interventions conceptualized and conducted? An analysis of published accounts
Recent discussions about the conduct of community interventions suggest the importance of developing more comprehensive theorizing about their nature and effects. The present study is an effort to infer how community interventions are theorized by the way they are represented in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature. A coding of a random sample of 200 community intervention reports in eight journals encompassing public health, community psycholo…
Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems
Conventional thinking about preventive interventions focuses over simplistically on the “package” of activities and/or their educational messages. An alternative is to focus on the dynamic properties of the context into which the intervention is introduced. Schools, communities and worksites can be thought of as complex ecological systems. They can be theorised on three dimensions: (1) their constituent activity settings (e.g., clubs, festivals, …
What Is Population Health Intervention Research
Population-level health interventions are policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions. These interventions might be programs or policies designed and developed in the health sector, but they are more likely to be in sectors elsewhere, such as education, housing or employment. Population health intervention research attempts to capture the value and diff…
Advancing the Science of Community-Level Interventions
Community interventions are complex social processes that need to move beyond single interventions and outcomes at individual levels of short-term change. A scientific paradigm is emerging that supports collaborative, multilevel, culturally situated community interventions aimed at creating sustainable community-level impact. This paradigm is rooted in a deep history of ecological and collaborative thinking across public health, psychology, anthr…
Ecological perspectives in health research
An ecological perspective on health emphasises both individual and contextual systems and the interdependent relations between the two. Origins of this approach have emanated from multiple disciplines over the past century or more. This article provides a glossary of perspectives, processes, and settings that pertain to an ecological approach in health research
The Privileging of Communitarian Ideas
The growing use of social science constructs in public health invites reflection on how public health researchers translate, that is, appropriate and reshape, constructs from the social sciences. To assess how 1 recently popular construct has been translated into public health research, we conducted a citation network and content analysis of public health articles on the topic of social capital. The analyses document empirically how public health…
Evidence suggests a need to rethink social capital and social capital interventions
Methods for exploring implementation variation and local context within a cluster randomised community intervention trial
Insignificant or modest findings in intervention trials may be attributable to poorly designed or theorised interventions, poorly implemented interventions, or inadequate evaluation methods. The pre-existing context may also account for the effects observed. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is outlined that will permit the determination of how context level factors might modify intervention effectiveness, within a cluster ran…
Lost in translation
Study objective: To examine the genealogy of the social capital concept in public health, with attention to the epistemological concerns and academic practices that shaped the way in which this concept was translated into public health. Design: A citation-network path analysis of the public health literature on social capital was used to generate a genealogy of the social capital concept in public health. The analysis identifies the intellectual …
A simple guide to chaos and complexity
The concepts of complexity and chaos are being invoked with increasing frequency in the health sciences literature. However, the concepts underpinning these concepts are foreign to many health scientists and there is some looseness in how they have been translated from their origins in mathematics and physics, which is leading to confusion and error in their application. Nonetheless, used carefully, “complexity science” has the potential to invig…
A glossary for evidence based public health
This glossary seeks to define and explain some of the main concepts underpinning evidence based public health. It draws on the published literature, experience gained over several years analysis of the topic, and discussions with public health colleagues, including researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students
A glossary of terms for navigating the field of social network analysis
Social network analysis is the study of social structure. This glossary introduces basic concepts in social network analysis. It is designed to help researchers to be more discriminating in their thinking and choice of methods
Solutions forgone? How health professionals frame the problem of postnatal depression
Understanding place and health
Research on media framing of public policies to prevent chronic disease
The Weight of Words
Co-production partnerships between policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are designed to facilitate production of relevant and readily usable research in health policy and practice contexts. We describe methodological strategies for in-depth collaborative analysis based on a co-produced ethnography of health promotion practice, involving ethnographic researchers and government-based research partners. We draw on a co-production dialogue to…
Understanding Interdisciplinary Collaborations as Social Networks
The dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration invite further investigation if we are to make this endeavour more rewarding and productive. We are using social network analysis to track the development of a new interdisciplinary collaboration on complex interventions to improve population health. It involves nineteen scholars across four countries. We report the Baseline network of formal relationships among the scholars, along with the impact o…
Minimal, negligible and negligent interventions
The Social Determinants of Health
Mock abstracts with mock findings
Background: A number of ways to conduct research are designed to maximise the likelihood that evidence from research is quickly transferred into practice. This includes action research and partnership research between researchers and policy makers. Such approaches focus research effort on questions of highest relevance to practice and policy so as to create ownership of the results. However, such approaches on their own do not necessarily visuali…
Frequently Asked Questions About Population Health Intervention Research
How are community interventions conceptualized and conducted? An analysis of published accounts
Recent discussions about the conduct of community interventions suggest the importance of developing more comprehensive theorizing about their nature and effects. The present study is an effort to infer how community interventions are theorized by the way they are represented in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature. A coding of a random sample of 200 community intervention reports in eight journals encompassing public health, community psycholo…
The Worldview of Hospital Security Staff
Interventions to encourage compliance with smoking control policies often rely on intermediaries for implementation, and the culture of the intermediary group might affect policy implementation. The authors present an ethnography of security staff involved in enforcing restrictive smoking policies in a large hospital in Canada. They find strong norms associated with control, mutuality, and deference to authority. Common sense interpretation rathe…
Socioeconomic disadvantage within a neighborhood, perceived financial security and self-rated health
Introducing a means of quantifying community reputation
Reliability of health utility measures and a test of values clarification
Development of a Model Within a Hospital System
A pilot project in the reorganisation of social work services for specific areas within a major teaching hospital is described. The system, referred to as Intake, involved social workers combining specific medical work areas within the hospital for centralised discussion and allocation of referrals on a daily basis. This article outlines the development of the system and describes an evaluation aimed at monitoring the Intake team's process, and a…
Capturing the meaning of ‘community’ in community intervention evaluation
Evaluations of community health promotion can underestimate the gains that an intervention might make in a community if the outcomes reported are limited to aggregates of changes in health behaviour or attitude made at an individual level The notion of ‘community’ revealed by this type of evaluation is relatively unsophisticated compared to the ‘community’ rhetoric which often accompanies program definition. Even those evaluations which report po…
Multiplying Health Gains
Working Invisibly
A series of six focus groups was held with health promotion workers to explore the meaning and experience of ‘capacity-building’, a term which is used variously in the literature. The research is part of a participatory, practice-based project to develop outcome indicators in capacity-building. Capacity-building was defined as seeking to develop health promotion skills and resources, and also problem-solving capability, at five levels: the indivi…
Making Dissemination a Two-Way Process
Despite repeated expressions of concern, both academic researchers and programme delivery practitioners have neglected the dissemination of new knowledge about health promotion programmes. This has meant that effective programmes are often not implemented as widely as they could be and that health promotion programmes are not achieving their full potential. This paper analyses what has been written in the published literature about dissemination …
Social capital and health promotion
Reliability of health utility measures and a test of values clarification
Solutions forgone? How health professionals frame the problem of postnatal depression
Complex interventions
Complex interventions are more than the sum of their parts, and interventions need to be better theorised to reflect this
Introducing a means of quantifying community reputation
A glossary for evidence based public health
This glossary seeks to define and explain some of the main concepts underpinning evidence based public health. It draws on the published literature, experience gained over several years analysis of the topic, and discussions with public health colleagues, including researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students
A glossary of terms for navigating the field of social network analysis
Social network analysis is the study of social structure. This glossary introduces basic concepts in social network analysis. It is designed to help researchers to be more discriminating in their thinking and choice of methods
Methods for exploring implementation variation and local context within a cluster randomised community intervention trial
Insignificant or modest findings in intervention trials may be attributable to poorly designed or theorised interventions, poorly implemented interventions, or inadequate evaluation methods. The pre-existing context may also account for the effects observed. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is outlined that will permit the determination of how context level factors might modify intervention effectiveness, within a cluster ran…
Ecological perspectives in health research
An ecological perspective on health emphasises both individual and contextual systems and the interdependent relations between the two. Origins of this approach have emanated from multiple disciplines over the past century or more. This article provides a glossary of perspectives, processes, and settings that pertain to an ecological approach in health research
The Privileging of Communitarian Ideas
The growing use of social science constructs in public health invites reflection on how public health researchers translate, that is, appropriate and reshape, constructs from the social sciences. To assess how 1 recently popular construct has been translated into public health research, we conducted a citation network and content analysis of public health articles on the topic of social capital. The analyses document empirically how public health…
Individual-Level and Neighborhood-Level Income Measures
BACKGROUND: Census-based measures of income often are used as proxies for individual-level income. Yet, the validity of such area-based measures relative to 'true' individual-level income has not been fully characterized. OBJECTIVES: The objectives of this study were (1) to determine whether area-based measures of household income are a suitable proxy for self-reported household income and (2) to assess whether these measures are associated with …
Understanding place and health
Lost in translation
Study objective: To examine the genealogy of the social capital concept in public health, with attention to the epistemological concerns and academic practices that shaped the way in which this concept was translated into public health. Design: A citation-network path analysis of the public health literature on social capital was used to generate a genealogy of the social capital concept in public health. The analysis identifies the intellectual …
A simple guide to chaos and complexity
The concepts of complexity and chaos are being invoked with increasing frequency in the health sciences literature. However, the concepts underpinning these concepts are foreign to many health scientists and there is some looseness in how they have been translated from their origins in mathematics and physics, which is leading to confusion and error in their application. Nonetheless, used carefully, “complexity science” has the potential to invig…
Complex interventions or complex systems? Implications for health economic evaluation
Although guidelines exist for evaluating complex interventions, they may be of little help in dealing with the multiple effects of interventions in complex systems such as hospitals. Alan Shiell , Penelope Hawe , and Lisa Gold explain why it is important to distinguish the two types of complexity
Great expectations and hard times
This paper reports on expectations for and community members' experience in the development of community indicators in a healthy communities initiative (HCI) in Alberta, Canada. The HCI process involved community visioning, the creation of action plans to further the vision by addressing key health priorities and/or community capacity building activities and the development of indicators to monitor and report on progress towards goals. Nineteen s…
Socioeconomic disadvantage within a neighborhood, perceived financial security and self-rated health
How health managers think about risk and the implications for portfolio theory in health systems
Attention is now being paid in the health economics literature to the insights offered by portfolio theory. Portfolio theory points to the advantages that arise from consideration of both risk and return when setting priorities. Realising these benefits assumes that managers in the health sector have the same understanding of risk as that suggested by the theory. We set out to explore this issue in interviews with health care managers in Alberta,…
Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems
Conventional thinking about preventive interventions focuses over simplistically on the “package” of activities and/or their educational messages. An alternative is to focus on the dynamic properties of the context into which the intervention is introduced. Schools, communities and worksites can be thought of as complex ecological systems. They can be theorised on three dimensions: (1) their constituent activity settings (e.g., clubs, festivals, …
What Is Population Health Intervention Research
Population-level health interventions are policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions. These interventions might be programs or policies designed and developed in the health sector, but they are more likely to be in sectors elsewhere, such as education, housing or employment. Population health intervention research attempts to capture the value and diff…
Medicine (44 works) · Nursing (33 works) · Political science (31 works) · Health Policy Implementation Science (30 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Public health (25 works) · Public relations (25 works) · Psychological intervention (21 works) · Community Health and Development (19 works)