52 weeks in public health research, part 28

Posted by Catt Turney, Bronia Arnott and Jean Adams

From Catt Turney: I've been thinking a lot recently about the role of place, space and environment in public health, and thought this smoking area at Paddington station was a nice example of a very simple space-related intervention. It's effectively a little cage around some chairs - the sign reads 'Smoking is only permitted in the area designated by barriers around this notice'. The station was busy but this area was completely deserted - a sign it's failing, or working as intended?

From Bronia Arnott: At Newcastle central train station to travel to Leeds for the UKCRC Public Health Research: Centres of Excellence Conference a couple of weeks ago to talk about developing interventions to promote active travel.

 

From Bronia Arnott: Being a parent can make you feel as if you are part of a government experiment that you never consented to at times. This week my daughter brought home this leaflet from school advertising the collaboration between Disney and Change4Life which you can read more about here. The idea is that by working together they will encourage children to increase their physical activity during the school summer holidays. As a developmental health psychologist I can't help but wonder if this intervention is being evaluated?

From Jean Adams: despite my Coke-marketing photo-obsession, my soft-drink of choice is in fact Diet Coke. So this can of Diet Pepsi was a novelty. Sometimes I wonder if people who put their name and face to junk food marketing campaigns think about the implications at all. Maybe Messi thought this was okay because it was Diet Pepsi and not the real thing (which I can understand, but might argue with). Or maybe he didn't think about it at all - it was just another photo shoot that his agent arranged for him.

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Just to remind you:

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.