Health Education & Behavior: Collaborating for Equity and Justice Call for Abstracts (Dec 15th)

November 29, 2017

A group of noted community scholars recently published six principles for collaborating for equity and justice (Wolff et al., 2017). Collectively, these principles argue that coalitions attempting to promote community change for health must embrace strategies with real potential to challenge the status quo and lead to transformative change in power, equity and justice. The principles address social and economic injustice, structural racism, community organizing to facilitate resident power and ownership, structural change, an acknowledgment of complexity, and the need to thoughtfully build on decades of practice and scholarship on collaborating for community change.

Health educators and health promotion specialists have tackled these issue for decades, with an emphasis on coalition-building, community organizing and more recently, policy, systems and environmental (PSE) change. There are a number of promising tools for achieving improved population health, and with strategic focus, reducing health disparities and moving toward health equity. Health Education & Behavior is committed to advancing the evidence-base for scholarship and practical strategies for achieving health equity. The special section on PSE, is a step in that direction.

The current call for papers will highlight recent work on how to work best towards transformative change. The Collaborating for Equity and Justice (CEJ) principles offer ideas for how to move past overly simplistic models, to be more inclusive, and to attempt more transformative changes.

Health Education and Behavior is interested in manuscripts that provide insights into one or more of the CEJ principles. They encourage multi-site or comparative studies of PSE change efforts; empirical studies of coalition efforts aligned with CEJ principles; empirical studies of efforts to achieve collective impact, which can also shed light on the CEJ principles; studies that suggest barriers or shortcomings of the CEJ principles; and other empirically-derived or theoretical insights into CEJ principles.

Abstracts are due December 15, 2017.  Full manuscripts are due July 2, 2018. This theme issue is expected to be published in 2019.

Through its publications, the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) explores social and behavioral change as they affect health status and quality of life. Health Education & Behavior also examines the processes of planning, implementing, managing, and assessing health education and social-behavioral interventions. The journal provides empirical research, case studies, program evaluations, literature reviews, and discussions of theories of health behavior and health status, as well as strategies to improve social and behavioral health.

Learn more about this call for abstracts at SOPHE.org.