Integrating Psychology and Public Health: Challenges and Opportunities

Psychology has made significant strides in developing applications relevant to public health. However, improvements are still needed to integrate psychology into the public health infrastructure. The challenge for public health is to recognize psychology's special contributions to policy and practice, especially to prevention of disease and injury. The challenge for psychology is to assure coherent integration of relevant theories, knowledge bases, and public health practice. Recommendations to address these challenges include (a) demonstrating how psychology incrementally improves public health service systems; (b) developing middle range and small theories of public health problems and practice ( Lipsey, 1993 ; Merton, 1968 ); (c) developing intervention models in partnership with nonpsychologists so that the effects can become widespread; and (d) ongoing scrutiny of the intervention models to assure that theory has been operationalized well. Psychology's unique role in public health is to act as the steward of a correct application of behavioral knowledge and theory.