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Understanding how social support and anxiety influence academic engagement in boys and girls is important to ensure that we effectively promote academic engagement. This study examined the relationship between gender, social support, anxiety, and academic engagement in elementary and junior high school students. Students in Grades 5 to 9 (N = 1,904) completed self-reports measuring academic engagement, anxiety, and perceived social support from family, friends, and school staff. Results indicated that girls were more likely to perceive social support and to score higher on the anxiety scale than boys were. Grade level was a significant predictor of academic engagement for boys but not for girls, while anxiety classification was a significant predictor of academic engagement for girls but not for boys. This study highlights the importance of understanding the multiple factors that influence academic engagement to provide targeted prevention and intervention strategies and how these factors differ for boys and girls.

Understanding what contributes to academic engagement is important to effectively support students. This study examines the relationship between sociodemographic factors, anxiety, social support, and academic engagement in elementary and junior high school students. Students in grades 5-9 (N = 1,904) completed self-reports measuring academic engagement, anxiety, social support from family and friends, and social support at school. Results indicated that (a) 20% of the variance between students' academic engagement is explained by grade level, gender, family affluence, social support and anxiety; (b) social support variables were predictors of academic achievement for both elementary and junior high school students; (c) elementary students reported higher levels of academic engagement; and (d) gender and anxiety levels were predictors of academic engagement for junior high students. This study emphasizes the ongoing importance of cultivating positive social supports for children. However, it is vital to identify the 80% of the variance between students in academic engagement that is currently "not" explained by the traditional factors under scrutiny. This will likely require a major rethink of models of research and intervention and more observational methods of investigation.

Background: Educational disengagement is a public health concern among Aboriginal populations in many countries. It has been investigated previously in a variety of ways, with the conventional focus being on the children themselves. Activity settings are events and places, theorized in terms of their symbols, roles, time frame, funds, people, and physical location. According to the theory, particular behaviors and experiences are shaped by different configurations among these elements. This study explored how activity settings theory might provide new insight on school engagement. Methods: Ethnographic study was undertaken at a grades primary to 12 school in a remote First Nations community in Canada's Northwest Territories. We collected data through interviews, focus groups, archival material, and field notes from 7 months of participant observation. An activity settings model acted as template for data collection and interpretation. Results: Different aspects of the school's physical layout, routines, procedures, transport systems, mix of people, and rules were able to be systematically assessed and classified as either creating or eroding engagement. Conclusion: This study applies an activity setting analysis to school engagement, thereby allowing researchers to investigate the dynamic and nested nature of context or environmental influences on engagement. It provides grounded observations that invite direct opportunities for action on dimensions that teachers and practitioners might not otherwise ''see.'' (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

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 psychology, and prevention science suggests the enduring influence of the laboratory tradition of psychology in both research design and the relationship of community interventionists to communities. Reflection on the underlying assumptions of community intervention theory and how community interventions are reported is recommended as critical to becoming more effective in improving community health. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

Programs and policies invariably contain new knowledge. Theories about knowledge utilization, diffusion, implementation, transfer, and knowledge translation theories illuminate some mechanisms of change processes. But more often than not, when it comes to understanding patterns about change processes, "the foreground" is privileged more than "the background". The foreground is the knowledge or technology tied up with the product or program that prompted the evaluation. The background is the ongoing dynamics of the context into which the knowledge is inserted. Complex adaptive system thinking encourages greater attention to this context and the interactions and consequences that result from the intervention, making these the forefront of attention. For the evaluator, there are implications of this shift in thinking. Process evaluations should be designed to capture the fluidity of the change process. Impact and outcome evaluations will require long time frames. Complex adaptive system thinking also encourages multilevel measures, a focus on structures, and capacity to assess the possibility of whole system transformation (whole school, whole organization) as a result of the newly introduced program or policy. For the people involved in the innovation, there is a corresponding shift from a focus on their knowledge (and competence) to assessment of their learning (and system-level capability). New ways to interpret fidelity in these situations should therefore be developed. (Contains 2 tables.)

Population health intervention research requires stronger definition. There are overlaps and differences between it and established domains such as evaluation, health impact assessment, knowledge translation, health services research, and social and public policy analysis. The value added of this growing field is its potential to draw more resources as well as diverse expertise, methods and ways of knowing under one umbrella at a critical time in history. That is, at a time when actions to reduce health inequities have become paramount.

Actions in Canada are being designed to transform the way research evidence is generated and used to improve population health. Capacity is being built in population health intervention research. The primary target is more understanding and examination of policies and programs that could redress inequities in health. The Population Health Intervention Research Initiative for Canada is a loosely-networked collaboration designed to advance the science of the field as well as the quantity, quality and use of population health intervention research to improve the health of Canadians. In the first few years there have been new training investments, new funding programs, new working guidelines for peer review, symposia and new international collaborations. This has been brought about by the strategic alignment of communication, planning and existing investments and the leveraging of new resources.

Background: We study geographic variation within one community in the City of Calgary using a more fine-grained geographic unit than the Census tract, the Census Dissemination Area (DA). While most Riverside residents consider their neighbourhood to be a fairly cohesive community, we explore the effect of socio-economic variation between these small geographic areas on individuals' self-reported health, net of individual level determinants., Methods: We merge data from the 2001 Census for Riverside, Calgary with a 2004 random telephone survey of Riverside residents. Our data are unique in that we have information on individuals from every DA wholly contained in the Riverside community. These data enable us to conduct multinomial logistic regression analyses of self-reported health using both individual-level and DA-level variables as predictors., Results: We find significant variation in measures of DA socio-economic status within the Riverside community. We find that individual self-reported health is affected by variation in an index of DA-level socio-economic disadvantage, controlling for individual variation in gender, age, and socio-economic status. We investigate each aspect of the DA index of disadvantage separately, and find that average education and the percent of households that are headed by a lone parent are most important., Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that, even within a cohesive community, contextual effects on health can be located at a smaller geographic level than the Census tract. Research on the effects of local area socio-economic disadvantage on health that combines administrative and survey data enables researchers to develop more comprehensive measures of social and material deprivation. Our findings suggest that both social and material deprivation affect health at the local level.

The social justice framing within the WHO Commission's Report on the Social Determinants of Health is vital. Yet it can too easily be dismissed as ideology and an unfit justification for major change. Although the general public acknowledges that structural factors, such as poverty, can affect health, they tend to see personal health behaviours as the strongest determinants of health, mirroring the main focus of health providers in recent decades. Thus a social reform agenda, while being an integral part of public health history, is nowadays too often seen as remote from the essential core of work in health. Translating the Commission's agenda into action therefore requires a recalibration of our entire health system, starting with an understanding of how complex issues can be framed in ways that inspire action, endorse mutuality of interests and enhance the perceived efficacy of the solutions, among the myriad of actors in position to make the reduction of health inequities succeed or fail. A sophisticated discourse analysis and/or communications research agenda could help to move us forward. It involves understanding and reframing the way politicians, policy-makers, practitioners and the public see "the problem" and reframing the potential of many roles in "the solution".

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 differential effect of these interventions, the processes by which they bring about change and the contexts within which they work best. In health research, unhelpful distinctions maintained in the past between research and evaluation have retarded the development of knowledge and led to patchy evidence about policies and programs. Myths about what can and cannot be achieved within community-level intervention research have similarly held the field back. The pathway forward integrates systematic inquiry approaches from a variety of disciplines.

The increasing availability, use and limitations of administrative data for place-based population health research, and a lack of theory development, created the context for the current paper. We developed a heuristic to interrogate administrative data sets and to help us develop explanatory pathways for linking place and health. Guided by a worked example, we argue that some items in administrative data sets lend themselves to multiple theories, creating problems of inference owing to the implications of using inductive versus deductive reasoning during the research process, and that certain types of theories are privileged when used administrative data bases.

Interest in social capital and health has emerged at an exciting time. In public health, there is a renewed interest in mechanisms that link social inequalities and health. In epidemiology, there has been a critical interrogation of methods and a call for a more explicit use of theory. In health promotion over the last 20-30 years, social health interventions have been somewhat marginalised in an era dominated by interest in traditional cardiovascular disease risk factors. Now that social hypotheses are being reborn in health, there is a risk that the sophistication that has developed in social health promotion and the literatures that have informed it could be overlooked. In this paper, we present a brief history of social capital and how it has come into recent prominence through the debate linking income inequality and health. We present the background to this, the earlier literatures on social environmental influences on health and the possible processes thought to underlie this relationship. Social capital has relational, material and political aspects. We suggest that, although the relational properties of social capital are important (eg, trust, networks), the political aspects of social capital are perhaps under recognised. The paper also reviews how complex social processes at the community level have come to be operationalised by social theorists and intervention agents in other fields. We suggest that social capital research so far has inadequately captured the underlying constructs, in particular the qualitative difference between the macro/context level and the micro/individual level. While being cautious about the science, we conclude that social capital's power as rhetoric and as a metaphor may be of value. We conclude by suggesting that the coalescence of interests in context-level influences on health now invites a revitalisation of theories and interventions inspired by diverse fields, such as geography and ecological community psychology.