20 years of Health Promotion Research in the Nordic countries: Health, well-being and physical activity

Since 1996, the Nordic Health Promotion Research Network (NHPRN) has organised the Nordic Health Promotion Research Conferences (NHPRC). The most recent NHPRC in 2016 was a celebration of its twenty years anniversary, whereby the 8th NHPRC theme was named accordingly ‘20 years of Health Promotion Research in the Nordic countries: health, wellbeing and physical activity’. The Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences (www.jyu.fi/sport/en) at the University of Jyväskylä hosted the conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, 20–22 June 2016.

The 8th NHPRC had three overarching scopes. The first scope was to review the past 20 years of health promotion overall and health promotion research in particular. The second scope related to the social determinants of health, which has meant a paradigm shift in local governance, that is, to focus more on health, welfare and sustainability, instead of economy. Under this scope, the Health in All Policies (HiAP) ideology was also dissected. The third scope focused on interventions in health promotion and implementation-related research.

The articles in this supplement aim to illustrate all three scopes of the conference and the variety of presentations heard over the three days. There are two types of articles in this supplement: (a) original research (5 articles); and (b) debate (10 articles). Original research articles focus on new empirical research findings and debate articles discuss issues around a certain area of health promotion practice or research. In addition, there is a commentary by Sir Michael Marmot.

Articles of the supplement include four keynote presentations, six oral, one poster presentation and four articles based on workshops. In addition, there is one article prepared by the Working Group on Equity in the NHPRN. Due to this variety, the supplement provides an interesting set of contributions discussing key thematic areas that were present at the conference and beyond. All articles published in this supplement have been processed according to double blind peer-review principles and are in line with the academic standards of the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health.