Getting People Active and Healthy: Who Knows Best?

Professor Tess Kay, Social Sciences and Health Theme Leader in the Institute for Environment, Health and Societies and Professor in Sport and Social Sciences, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture entitled “Getting People Active and Healthy: Who Knows Best?”

About the Lecture

Why won’t people be more active? The scientific evidence is strong, public health messages are clear…..don’t people want to be healthy?

In this lecture, Professor Kay investigates why advice from scientists and policymakers so often has so little impact. Focusing on guidelines for physical activity, she asks whether the knowledge of experts is enough to produce effective solutions for real-world problems. In line with the World Health Organization, Professor Kay suggests that to improve physical activity policy, we also need to improve our understanding of the social processes that influence and constrain people.

To do this means not only making more use of social science knowledge, but also drawing on the expert knowledge of practitioners and community members – the people who may really ‘know best’. Together these can help bridge the gap between the protected environment in which health problems are analyzed, and the complex everyday contexts in which they occur.

About Professor Tess Kay

I joined the School of Sport and Education (now the College of Health and Life Sciences) at Brunel in September 2010 after several years as a sports academic at Loughborough University. I am a multi-disciplinary social scientist who has been working in sport and leisure research since the 1980s.

Over the course of my career I have undertaken a broad range of sports research, including a substantial body of work on youth sport carried out between 2003-10 as Deputy Director of Loughborough University’s Institute of Youth Sport. Prior to this I had participated in the wider social policy research community, including several years working with comparative European researchers. Much of my personal research reflects this background, and addresses social policy agenda that stretch beyond sport to include issues such as multiculturalism, health and well-being, and education. I enjoy the opportunity to work with academics and policymakers in multidisciplinary collaborations to address wider research issues around sport.