Building a Culture of Prevention: Tasks for Multi-Taskers
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Building a Culture of Prevention: Tasks for Multi-Taskers Maria Rosaria Galanti 1
# Society for Prevention Research 2020
Abstract Building a culture of prevention presents many challenges, all of which originate from and refer back to both strengths and weaknesses of this effort. In this invited commentary, I provide an overview of these challenges and remaining open questions extracted from the original contribution enclosed in the special issue. Crucial questions that need to be addressed are the use of formal models of a “culture of prevention”; how the interplay of local values, alliances, and co-creational processes can be reflected in other experiences; and evaluation of the culture change itself.
No time is more suitable than the present one—facing the universal menace of the COVID-19 pandemic—to reflect on the alliance of these two terms: “culture” and “prevention,” if not for other reasons to preserve the idea of pursuing sustainable health goals for the whole planet. The excellent issue of Prevention Science guest-edited by Petras and collaborators on this theme offers valuable suggestions to conceptualize this alliance, at the same time presenting at least as many challenges and questions. These challenges are expected and desirable. “Cultures” do not raise (and do not fall) in weeks or months, not even years. Therefore, I focus more on expanding on the problematic and provoking sides of this complicated matter, rather than on the merits of the contributions of the specific papers.
Formal Models of a Culture of Prevention: Why Do We Need Them? The contributions in this issue refer to different aspects of formalization of the concept “culture of prevention” in terms of its theoretical antecedents and constituents. These efforts are laudable, most of the time leading to the identification of similar or identical ingredients” (perhaps not surprising since the contributors may share similar academic and network environments). Examples of these ingredients are the translation in the current practice of effective interventions (Heikkilä et al. 2020) and envisioning multi-level (system) changes and * Maria Rosaria Galanti [email protected] 1
Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden
partnerships (Bollmann et al. 2020; Exner-Cortens et al. 2019; Murphy et al. 2018; Sentell et al. 2018). These efforts are courageous, because they use “cultural models” as a proactive and conscious process, far from the historically more common inductive process of deriving cultural models to classify and interpret facts and observations. However, I feel the urgency of sharing thoughts on a more fundamental question: why do we need formal models of something so elusive as “culture-shaping”? How are we going to use these formal models? The paper by Bollmann et al. (2020) contains valuable hints to address these questions. Perhaps, we should explicitly endorse the challenge that cultural models of prevention should be used to make previsions, not to explain what just happened or to constrain s
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