The “Best of 2022 List” of Health Promotion Researchers

2022 Papers of the Year Award Criteria

The award criteria our journal editors considered were applied to both the study and the paper such that the:

1. Study addresses a topic of timely importance in health promotion.

2. Research question is clearly stated and the methodologies used are well executed.

3. Paper is often cited and/or downloaded.

4. Study findings offer a unique contribution to the literature.

5. Paper is well-written and enjoyable to read.

Editor in Chief Award 2022

Editor’s Picks Awards: The Best of 2022 List of Health Promotion Researchers (Volume 36)

Michael P. O’Donnell Award 2022

Dorothy Nyswander Award 2022

Battling Misinformation

Look up the etymology of “desperate times call for desperate measures” and you will likely run across Hippocrates and the extremely intractable diseases of his era. This year’s long stubborn pandemic shaped health promotion practice in 2022 such that common place approaches were clearly insufficient. In our “Best of 2021” research papers, we featured studies focused on individual level pandemic communications campaigns and preferred sources of COVID-19 information among health professionals. ² As if acknowledging that usual care was not up to the task against this exceedingly pernicious virus, our “best of” researchers in 2022 asked ever more specific questions about why COVID kept winning. A best example came from Sayuri Sekimitsu and colleagues who studied key motivators amongst Black Americans and found that vaccine hesitancy was exacerbated by trust issues. As if modeling what an inclusive approach to problem solving entails, Sekimitsu’s 10 research collaborators hailed from several universities and academic disciplines. They found that vaccine uptake was curtailed by fear of side effects, a history of medical mistreatment of Blacks and perceptions of low risk of disease. ³

In addition to the quest for tailored strategies most relevant to select populations, what is making today’s scientists seek out desperate, and disparate, ideas and solutions is that distrust in science has been spreading every bit as profusely as have viral mutations. The “Knowing Well/Being Well” (KWBW) section of this journal is dedicated to addressing current issues in the field with health promotion practitioners as a prime readership target. We keep this section of the journal open access as a service to the health promotion profession and as a way to remind our non-subscribers of the genius that resides within these pages. I count Dr. Sara Johnson, our co-editor for the KWBW section, as one of this journal’s standard bearers for that level of smarts. To wit, Johnson ⁴ dedicated a full issue of KWBW to ideas about “coordinated and comprehensive efforts to combat misinformation” and attracted top scientist from throughout the country to teach us about effective health communications in a time of divisiveness.

My Editor in Chief Award winning paper this year comes from that KWBW section and was written by self-proclaimed “nerdy girls.” Led by Dartmouth’s Dr. Lindsey Leininger, this paper was co-authored by a cohort of brilliant researchers, also from all parts of the country, who have committed to being “your trusted messengers for practical and factual health information.” As is detailed in their paper about their “Dear Pandemic Playbook,” they set out to “invigorate the scientific discipline of infodemiology… by intentionally bringing together many disciplines to share perspectives including data science, health communication, behavioral science, and epidemiology.” Now with over 2000 posts on their “those nerdy girls” Website, these scholars hope that “by combining infodemic practice and research, we can be helpful to fellow health professionals working hard to amplify the impact of good health information and lessen the impact of the bad.” ⁵

I had the pleasure of hosting Leininger in a HERO national webinar which, like Leininger’s article in this journal, is open access. ⁶ Scroll down to the September 2021 air date of the webinar to see Leininger’s presentation and learn more about the communications framework that guides the @DearPandemic platform. ⁷ While the platform was spawned by the pandemic, recent posts respond to other current issues such as: “What if I have an unplanned pregnancy? What are my options now that Roe was overturned?” and “What is the ‘RSV’ I’ve been hearing about?”

The Imperative of Environmental and Organizational Supports

Our award winning researchers studied each of the major sectors and the role they can play in fostering, or impeding, well-being. As a journal serving a discipline comprised of an eclectic blend of experts, we are pleased to field submissions from community based public health researchers as well as workplace based intervention designers, all with the audacious aim of achieving population level health improvement. One of the highest potential sectors for exerting influence on ways to improve health is, paradoxically, our sick care sector. A question about whether physicians are playing an active role in promoting physical activity was answered in a superbly executed literature review led by Kristin Grogg and colleagues from West Virginia University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Their description of the state of the art of “physical activity assessment and promotion in clinical settings in the United States” earned them this year’s “Michael P. O’Donnell Paper of the Year.”

O’Donnell is this journal’s founder and Editor in Chief Emeritus and author of the “AMSO Framework”, an acronym that features the role of awareness, motivation, skills and opportunity in behavior change. AMSO also served as the organizing frame for O’Donnell’s ⁸ book: “Health Promotion in the Workplace”, which is available for free as a PDF. When not publishing research, O’Donnell led health promotion efforts in medical systems for much of his career. Writing for this journal with the successor to his leadership role at Cleveland Clinic, David Pauer and O’Donnell set out “What Factors were Most Important for the Success of the Cleveland Clinic Employee Wellness Program?” ⁹

I’m certain O’Donnell appreciated the rigor of the data extraction and synthesis behind Grogg and colleague’s scoping review with 654 studies identified and screened for 78 eligibility criteria. These researchers found 56 studies reporting statistically significant outcome measures and 17 with interventions that improved physical activity levels. ¹⁰ Like O’Donnell, I spent most of my health promotion practitioner career in a large medical center and became fully appreciative of how demanding caring for the sick is for clinicians. Of special interest to me in this literature review was that the majority of the randomized controlled trials in the review, 43 of the qualifying studies, were delivered by physicians and nurses in primary care settings. In a recent editorial I reflected on the challenges of offering prevention education and lifestyle medicine in our sick care system, in part, due to reimbursement disincentives. ¹¹ Grogg and colleagues give me hope that our sick care system retains the potential to become a force for healthcare one day.

Most professionals formally trained in this discipline were ensconced early on in the socio-ecological framework and the attendant interplay between social forces and individual choices. Where Grogg’s literature review speaks to the potential power of the health sector in fostering healthy choices, our “best of 22” papers also showed how neighborhoods and work environments support health practices or impede positive health outcomes. Joshua Egede and colleagues from the Medical College of Wisconsin studied the relationship between neighborhood factors and factors such as stress and glycemic control. While there is ample prior research demonstrating the connections between diet, exercise and diabetes control, Egede and colleagues went much further upstream to create a model that better explained self-care behaviors. Their final model linked violence, crime and discrimination to higher or lower stress and self-efficacy. In turn, those with higher self-efficacy and lower stress had better diets, did more exercise and lowered their HbA1c′s.

The causal pathways most often studied in workplaces also tend to be limited to a few intuitively obvious variables such as lower stress being associated with higher productivity. Dr. Kristi Rahrig Jenkins and her colleagues from the University of Michigan also took a longer trip up stream to better understand sources of stress and variation in perceptions of organizational support. This robust examination included differences between participants in their “MHealthy” program relative to low, medium and high wage earners, problematic relationships, heavy work responsibilities and perceptions of supervisor support. They found that lower perceived support from supervisors amplify stressful work and that low wage earners, in particular, perceived lower levels of supervisory report. ¹² Jenkins and colleagues, like Egede and Grogg, offer fascinating insights into the power of culture and environmental supports and give practitioners occasion to revisit the socio-ecological framework as they consider the surest pathways to support population health improvement.

Pioneering Diversity and Equity in Health Promotion

As I draft this editorial, the Supreme Court is hearing testimony on affirmative action policy and journalists are anticipating the demise of race conscious recruiting practices at universities. I have been reading intently about race neutral approaches to admissions and, so far, I am coming up short in understanding how one can be anti-racist and race neutral at the same time. Like most working in public health with a commitment to reducing health inequities, I strive to bring race issues, including unconscious bias, to the fore when reviewing research studies and deciding on moving studies forward for peer review and publication. For sure, the quality and integrity of the research is of prime concern. After that, I remain committed to factoring in the diversity, including race and gender, of the study participants as well as that of the principal researchers as variables that should inform what gets published in this journal. I am confident that the foremother of our field, Dorothy Nyswander, would support my discriminating approach.

We honored Dr. Natalia I. Heredia, PhD, MPH and her colleagues with our “Dorothy Nyswander Paper of the Year Award” for their study of the relationship between neighborhood environment factors and health variables such as physical activity, depression and chronic conditions in a Hispanic/Latino cohort on the Texas-Mexico border. Nyswander is considered the pioneer of the field of health education and she called for an “open society” which was a society “where diversity is respected; where pressure groups cannot stifle and control the will of the majority or castigate the individual; where education brings upward mobility to all; where the best of health care is available to all; where poverty is a community disgrace not an individual’s weakness.” ¹³

Consistent with Nyswander’s philosophy about the impact of a supportive community, Dr. Heredia and her team from The University of Texas Health Center at Houston, School of Public Health examined covariates such as crime, traffic, and lack of street lights or nearby shops. Such factors were shown to increase anxiety and reduce physical activity. As would Nyswander, these authors argued that “the neighborhood environment is a meaningful contextual variable to consider for health-related interventions in Hispanic/Latino adults.” ¹⁴ Nyswander would likely add that greater investments in the education of Hispanic/Latino youth would also mitigate against progression toward chronic health problems.

I have come to assume that the handful of wellness apostates who deride health promotion professionals don’t read studies like those in our “best of 2022 list.” That is because I seldom read a critique from a blogger troll that these serious scholars have not already leveled on their own research. When I have co-authored original research papers, I have usually taken lead on drafting the discussion and limitations sections. Trying to put your study’s findings in the context of knowledge that preceded your hypothesis, and describing factors that could invalidate your findings, has always impressed me as the hardest, but also the most enjoyable part of research. When you read these award-winning author’s discussion sections you will see how they applied what they learned to continuous improvement for our discipline, to enlarging our field’s reach and to producing a more equitable world.

Stephen Hawking said that “science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.” ¹⁵ The leaders featured here show us how fastidious study methods and accessible scientific writing can be intentionally aligned with compassionate advocacy for health and well-being for all. Congratulations to these first authors and co-authors. We dedicate our selection and publishing of these “best papers” to all health promotion scientists who are confronting health disparities and working to achieve equity in families, communities and workplaces.

Paul E. Terry, Ph.D., Editor in Chief, American Journal of Health Promotion, Senior Fellow, HERO (The Health Enhancement Research Organization).