Looking toward the future of OHP research

As we noted at the outset of this volume, occupational health psychology (OHP) has arrived as an established occupational health discipline with a thriving scientifi c community. OHP scholars have made tremendous progress in understanding the nature of occupational health problems and great strides in understanding the kinds of interventions necessary to address those problems. With this great progress in mind, what are the important next steps in the scientifi c progress of OHP? One answer to this question is to simply continue to do more and better science. However, in applied fi elds, such as OHP, there is no single clear answer as to what constitutes better science. For some, better science might mean using ever more sophisticated designs and analytic methods to capture the complexity of occupational health phenomena. For others, better science might mean choosing to analyze important occupational health problems, such as problems that are widespread in frequency, socially signifi cant in their consequences, or both. Still others might argue that the positive psychology revolution challenges OHP scholars to reframe the orientation of the fi eld toward creating healthy workplaces, rather than focusing solely on “problems” associated with undesirable health outcomes.