Prevention and health promotion research focuses on reducing the burden of chronic and other diseases and improving and maintaining health while respecting differences in human experiences. This research focuses on reducing the risk of disease, injury, and morbidity, improving health, or enhancing well-being. This research also includes strength-based approaches that build on assets and resources to protect health.
Research developed using this lens is conducted along a continuum from primordial prevention that targets underlying risks to tertiary prevention that aims to reduce symptoms, severity, and progression. Health promotion includes but is not limited to efforts to facilitate behaviors that reduce risk, improve health, manage disease, and enhance well-being. Holistic prevention and health promotion efforts aim to eliminate health disparities by accounting for the structural, social, environmental, behavioral, psychosocial, and biological factors that affect risk. Effective prevention and health promotion efforts must move beyond knowledge transfer and collectively address health-influencing factors at multiple levels, including individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal.
Of particular interest is prevention and health promotion research that investigates interventions, tests multilevel strategies, and systematically examines how, for whom, under what conditions, and when interventions work.