THE BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGICAL MODEL: A GUIDE FOR REAL TIME MEASURES AND REAL TIME INTERVENTIONS
TITLE:
THE BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGICAL MODEL: A GUIDE FOR REAL TIME MEASURES AND REAL TIME INTERVENTIONS
DATE:
Friday, Sep 7th, 2012
TIME:
3:30 PM
LOCATION:
GMCS 214
SPEAKER:
Melbourne F. Hovell, PhD, MPH
Director, Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health
Distinguished Professor of Public Health, Graduate School of Public Health,
San Diego State University
ABSTRACT:
Technological limitations have restricted theoretical and operational fidelity of most health behavior programs. Emerging real time measurement and telemetry technology now present the ability to more fully test real-time interventions for health behaviors. Real-time interventions promise larger changes and an increased likelihood of sustained change. Few of the existing health behavior theories are up to the task. This colloquium will present an R & D program for the reduction of Second Hand Smoke exposure (SESe) in families that is guided by the emerging Behavioral Ecological Model (BEM). The BEM stems from biology, is based on principles of behavior that have been extended to social systems and populations. Brief and more intensive counseling programs that show promising effects for reducing SHSe and preventing preteens from smoking are summarized. Pilot data employing new real time measures and feedback will be provided. Discussion will consider predictive models of factors that might sustain home smoking bans and navigation models by which powerful interventions might be employed to compete with unknown perturbations in real time tracking of health related behavior.
This presentation is to invite multidisciplinary collaboration from mathematicians, engineers and other scientific disciplines from which we might achieve greater understanding of and change in human behavior not thought possible as recently as a few years ago. Hospitals are filled with machines that were originally derived by physicists playing with forms of radiation such as x-rays. The mathematics used to clean up blurry images from the flawed Hubble telescope are now used for detecting breast cancer. (DeGrasse-Tyson N, Land A. Space Chronicles. W W Norton & Company Incorporated; 2012.) Perhaps the next leap in behavioral science will come from substantial guidance from engineers and mathematics to guide predictions of dynamic behavioral outcomes, as well as their theoretical determinants. Given the complexity and ever changing environment that dictates ever changing human behavior, is it possible that real time technology might provide navigation systems that enable maintenance of healthy practices in the context of environmental perturbations for which we have only theory to guide more powerful interventions to correct our course?
HOST:
Dr. Antonio Palacios.
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