World Views, Systems Theory, and Health Promotion

Abstract

As the field of health promotion grows, it is important to investigate new conceptual and theoretical models of health. To date, health promotion has relied primarily on theories and models from other fields. This limits the development of health promotion as a discipline. These limitations become apparent when health promotion programming is analyzed from three different “world views”: formism, mechanism, and organicism. The health promotion professional's “world view” affects the manner in which they plan programs. As a discipline, health promotion needs to move beyond the current dominance of the mechanistic world view to organismic or systemic thinking. In doing so, general systems theory provides a generic, contentless theoretical framework to guide newly developing health promotion programs.