Strengthening competence in research on health interventions: Collaboration with Stanford University and University of California, Davis

The Research Centre for Health Promotion, U of Bergen, has considerable experience in developing and evaluating health promotion interventions, such as: - The BE smokeFREE programme (with the Norwegian Cancer Society) - The Olweus programme for the preven tion of bullying - The EC-funded SATZ project, involving seven European and African universitites. The 2004 evaluation of public health reseach in Norway concluded that the research at HEMIL was "very good" with "features of excellence". The panel encour aged HEMIL to aim at excellence, and at strengthening its position as one of the leading centres for such research in Europe. The Centre has already established collaboration with a number of strong research institutions in Europe. The present project ai ms at strengthening the Centre's research through collaboration with two of the leading universitites in the U.S. on health promotion interventions. Staff at Department of Psychology at Stanford are among the top researchers worldwide on theory and concep tual frameworks for planning and evaluation of health behaviour interventions. My collaboration will be with professor Lee Ross in particular. This will allow for a broader contact with staff at Stanford, for instance professor Albert Bandura. At Departm ent of Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis, professor Marc Braverman has established a research group that plays a central role in evaluation of community-based tobacco interventions across California. Braverman will be my pri mary collaborator at UC-Davis. The collaboration will start when Bandura and Braverman visit Bergen in June 2005, and will continue during my 10 months as visiting scholar at Stanford University. The outcomes of this project will be particularly importan t for HEMILs future involvement in research on health promotion interventions, for instance within the context of the new UoB Centre of Exellence-Consortium on Priority Interventions in Global Health.