ID: 1855
Presenting Author: Michael Edelstein
Session: 662 - The next 30 years of Health Impact Assessment: introducing the Handbook on HIA
Status: pending
As HIA evolves, integration of PSIA is an essential tool for aligning assessments with the experiences of those affected by proposed or emergent change.
Psycho-Social Impact Assessment (PSIA) has direct application to Health Impact Assessment (HIA). Moreover, Psycho-Social Impacts routinely involve issues that affect and are affected by health status, as illustrated by the COVID-19 epidemic and retrospective and prospective studies addressing environmental contamination. In this paper, the PSIA chapter for the HIA handbook is discussed. This includes reference to qualitative approaches using the Theory of Environmental Turbulence (TET), as well as quantitative approaches such as statistical modelling. TET addresses the consequences of environmental change that alters affected people’s lifescape (their understandings of their health, efficacy, security of home and safety of environment, their ability to practice livelihood and their trust for government and others), lifestyle (their normal behaviors and activities) and lifestrain (experienced stress and coping costs of adapting to imposed change). As HIA evolves to address the challenges of the next three decades, integration of PSIA is an essential tool for aligning assessments with the experiences of those affected by proposed or emergent environmental and social change.
Michael R. Edelstein is an Environmental Psychologist with more than fifty years’ experience studying and writing about Psycho-Social Impacts. The third edition of Contaminated Communities is coming.