An Interview with Victor J. Strecher

Abstract

1. What got you interested in wellbeing research? I was getting frustrated with my focus on health related behaviors for their own sake. It seemed like we were studying plants but not the soil they grew in. For example, when trying to help a person quit smoking we’d find that certain strategies helped, but underlying that always seemed to be a ‘why?’. Why did you finally decide to quit after twenty years of smoking? The ‘why?’ questions relate more to a person's wellbeing. Many behaviors that we've studied for so long, often if you follow a root cause analysis, seemed to go back to a loss of wellbeing, loneliness, isolation, alienation, anomie. I think those are the roots of many of our poor..