Social Ecological Model

An Ecological Approach to Health Promotion and Physical Activity

After many years of the dominance of individual oriented models that centered on determinants on the field of health promotion , these models has been challenged for its limited value for the understanding of persons’ health (1-4). The primary drive of these critiques was that the individual based approach focused on the individual behavior changing while neglecting the social, economic, environmental and political context, within which individual health behaviors are both formed and occurred, resulting in victim blaming (3, 5, 6). Moreover, these models have been criticized for their limitation in decreasing the health inequality within population (7, 8). Previous data show

Accordingly, the focus was almost-exclusive on interventions that target individuals or small groups (9). However, as discussed previously in this paper, these models did not satisfy the scope of physical activity promotion. Accordingly, the interest of using ecological model to understand and promote physical activity has been growing. Ecological model are particularly well suited for studying and promoting physical activity because physical activity is done in specific places (9, 28, 33). Ecological models lead to the explicit consideration of multiple levels of influence, thereby guiding the development of more comprehensive interventions (1, 9, 33). In addition to the previously known individual and sociocultural factors, using ecological model in the field of physical activity directs the attention to environmental and policy factors. Ecological model draw the attention to address the physical environment by enhancing the accessibility to the physical- activity related sittings and improving these sittings characteristics (9, 33). Physical activity settings include places related to the following four domains: recreation, transportation, workplace and household (9). Interventions to enhance physical activity through targeting environment include establishing walking and biking trails, creating more parks and recreation centers, separating buildings from barking slots by green space and making stairways more open, accessible and attractive. It also includes designing neighborhoods in a way that allow peoples to walk to their school or workplace, installing showers and change rooms in buildings as well as provide secure parking for bicycles (9, 33, 34). Indeed, most of these interventions