In the Behavioral Research Program, we are interested in what causes people to smoke;
what causes people to get screened, or to not get screened for cancer; to use sunscreen
to protect themselves from the sun; and various other behaviors.
It’s not that we can just focus on one particular behavior as a way of preventing cancer.
Most people are familiar with the relationship between smoking and cancer prevention.
But there are other factors that influence cancer prevention as well.
If we could get people to eat better, exercise more, stop smoking, we could actually prevent
about 50% of cancers, and a lot of other health issues.
We think of behavior quite broadly.
The psychological, cognitive, affective factors that sort-of drive your ability to engage
- or not engage - in those behaviors.
There is a lot of work that is also done in the chronic disease management of the spectrum
– adherence, how people sort-of manage their disease – all of those are essentially behaviors.
And so most of actually, of medical care, is behavioral in nature as well.
A lot of the big focus of behavioral research today is really on the influence of systems
and environments.
So, multiple levels of influence on individual patients and decision-making; on hospitals
and communities.
This is a bigger part of behavioral research today.
We need to understand the family context; the organizational context, the environment.
‘I’m not going to exercise,’ for example, ‘if I live in an environment where exercise
is not possible.
‘I’m not going to get screened if it’s not covered by my insurance.’
That’s the key message of behavioral research these days.
It’s to think about all the different levels.
You asked ‘what is the future of behavioral research?’
and in my opinion, it really is on “Big Data.”
Especially with the world of technology, and whether through mobile phones or something,
we can deliver interventions, or we can track people’s behavior.
I think we just need to harness those data, how to make them useful; and again, how to
translate them into ways that affect people’s behavior – so we can affect people’s behavior
in a very positive way.
When I think a lot of research is going to look, in the future, at how to understand
the electronic environment; and how people’s smartphones might be used to actually, to
advance their health.
People are using apps all the time now to facilitate diet; and to facilitate weight
loss; and smoking cessation; and all kinds of other behaviors.
And it will be interesting to track that over time.
It’s a whole new world that scientists really need to understand.
There are a number of various and future directions for behavioral research.
So, not only understanding how we can address mechanisms of long-term behavior sustainability
but better understanding human dynamics; the influences of family and family environment;
the relationships of the family home.
vs. the larger external environment – built environment – around the home.
And how social influences impact that.
Those are areas where we’ve made some good ground, in terms of our understanding, but
remain with a lot of opportunities to continue to grow and develop.
We, for a very long time, measured behavior primarily via self-report.
You tell me that you smoke or you don’t smoke.
You tell me how much you diet or exercise, those sorts of things.
We’re increasingly becoming better at being able to sense those things passively.
The sensor technology is getting to the point where we can actually give people sensors
that will tell us how much physical activity they have engaged in; how much of dietary
intake they have; smoking behavior they’ve engaged in, those sorts of things; adherence
to medications.
And I think we just need to challenge ourselves as researchers to actually explore new methods
and new approaches.
You know we often think that the story of tobacco and health is old and done, and we
know everything we need to know.
But that’s really not the case.
We have a proliferation of many new tobacco products; we have new federal authority through
the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco marketing, manufacturing, and distribution.
And so there is quite a bit of an opportunity to look at how these factors are going to
influence both youth and adult tobacco use behaviors.
The field of survivorship has matured to a point where we’re now having cohorts of
survivors that are surviving 20, 30, 40 years.
And so I think we’re just at the brink of understanding the long-term unintended consequences.
It’s really important, I think, for the graduate education model to change in a way
that really teaches new PhD students how the work that they do potentially could be relevant
- and how to make it relevant from the out-set - from a public health point of view.
So, ‘I’m going to do this study.
What’s going to happen if it actually pans out and works?
And the hypothesis works out.
Can it be something that can be scaled up to a population-level?’
That’s something that behavioral researchers don’t typically get trained to think about.
But if they do, they can have more of an impact on public health.