Social Ecological Model of Health

The social ecological model conceptualizes health broadly and focuses on multiple factors that might affect health. This broad approach to thinking of health, advanced in the 1947 Constitution of the World Health Organization, includes physical, mental, and social well-being (World Health Organization, 1947). The social ecological model understands health to be affected by the interaction between the individual, the group/community, and the physical, social, and political environments (Israel et al., 2003; Sallis et al., 2008; Wallerstein et al., 2003).