Behavioral sciences concepts in research on the prevention of violence.

Violence prevention is a growing priority in the field of public health. Public health is a hybrid enterprise, and scholarship in this field lies at the intersection of diverse scientific disciplines. Traditionally, violence research has attracted experts in such areas as sociology, criminology, and psychology (1–13). This confluence of specialties has yielded numerous empirical studies documenting individual and cultural risk factors and a moderate number of studies on prevention, mostly involving secondary prevention at the individual level (14, 15). However, since the costs of violence are largely medical—including mental health—it is natural that the problem of violence has also come to the attention of specialists in preventive medicine and public health (16–18). Public health scientists and activists are interested in the causes and effects of social and environmental problems that influence the health of whole populations. Epidemiological research methods are used to precisely measure the incidence and prevalence of events and conditions, and comparative studies are conducted on the environmental, cultural , and behavioral risk factors that underlie variations in rates of disease and injury. After risk factors are identified, interventions can be tested and put into practice. Public health studies of violence have documented the scale of the problem and begun to identify environmental factors that are now legitimate targets for public health policy advocacy, such as unauthorized handgun possession (19, 20). Cultural factors underlying variations in violence rates are not yet well understood, and further research is needed on the role of attitudes and social norms in promoting or restraining aggressive behaviors in diverse populations. Concha, Carrion, and Cobo (1) recently edited an important publication examining violence in Latin America from an interdisciplinary, public health perspective. Various sociological and anthro-pological studies have provided great insight into different manifestations of violence. However, there has been little direct linkage between social science and epidemiological research approaches and almost no formal comparative studies of cultural and social variables in different regions or nations. When viewed from the public health perspective , sociological and psychological studies of the suspected causes of violence can be interpreted as a form of behavioral epidemiology and a source of hypotheses about causes of violence. In a similar