Christine Stephens | |
---|---|
Other names | Christine Vivienne Stephens |
Alma mater | Massey University |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Massey University |
Thesis |
Christine Vivienne Stephens ONZM is a critical health psychologist and New Zealand psychology academic. She is currently professor of psychology at Massey University based in the Palmerston North. [1] She is one of the founding members of the International Society of Critical Health Psychology, which she has also chaired. [2]
Stephens completed a master's degree at Massey University on occupational overuse syndrome and psychosocial stressors, [3] followed by a PhD on occupational overuse in the New Zealand police force in 1993. [4] She joined the staff at Massey in 1996, rising to professor. [1] Upon appointment she developed a course in health promotion, which was offered from 2001 and which she taught until 2016. [5] During this time she authored a book on health promotion, entitled Health Promotion: A Psychosocial Approach and published in 2008. [6] Stephens co-leads the cross-disciplinary Health and Ageing Research Team (HART) with Fiona Alpass, also at Massey. [7] [8] [9] [10] The team's major focus is a longitudinal study of quality of life in ageing (Health, Work and Retirement study), the New Zealand Longitudinal Study of Ageing. [11] The research team has conducted bi-annual surveys of a population sample of older people for over 10 years. The research also includes in-depth qualitative studies on topics such as informal care-giving, palliative care, experiences of terminal illness, and housing needs. [12]
Stephen's current research is located at the intersection of health psychology and gerontology. Her scholarly work is presently focused on the requirements of the ageing population and the need to provide information for supportive social policy and practice. She has made a significant theoretical contribution to this area, along with colleague Mary Breheny, an associate professor at Massey University and member to the Health and Ageing Research Team. Together they have drawn on Amartya Sen's well-known capability approach to develop a nuanced theoretical framework that transcends a purely biomedical view by recognizing ideas of resilience, as well as the experiences of older people themselves in determining what it means to age well. [13]
In the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours, Stephens was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to health psychology and seniors. [14]
Elizabeth Audrey Gordon is a former New Zealand politician. She was an MP from 1996 to 2002, representing the Alliance.
Health psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare. The discipline is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness. Psychological factors can affect health directly. For example, chronically occurring environmental stressors affecting the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, cumulatively, can harm health. Behavioral factors can also affect a person's health. For example, certain behaviors can, over time, harm or enhance health. Health psychologists take a biopsychosocial approach. In other words, health psychologists understand health to be the product not only of biological processes but also of psychological, behavioral, and social processes.
The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is a detailed study of human health, development and behaviour. Based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the Dunedin Study has followed the lives of 1037 babies born between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973 at Dunedin's former Queen Mary Maternity Centre since their birth. Teams of national and international collaborators work on the Dunedin Study, including a team at Duke University in the United States. The research is constantly evolving to encompass research made possible by new technology and seeks to answer questions about how people's early years have an impact on mental and physical health as they age.
Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long working hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.
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Fiona Margaret Alpass is a New Zealand academic at Massey University.
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