"I reviewed the syllabi from EVERY social behavioral public health class being taught in the United States."
Seven Models - limit our effectiveness in changing people's behavior
This is all a repeat of last week's class.
1. Health Belief Model
- Rational Decision Making
- A person weighs the benefits of a behavior against the costs, this dictates intention
- Assumption - Intention equals behavior
- Good things:
- Perceived Susceptibility
- Perceived Severity
- Used: Demonstrate either susceptibility or severity, or demonstrate positive benefits of an action (quitting smoking)
- Attitudes towards behavior affect one’s intentions (internal motivation)
- Perceived social norms (external motivation)
- Criticism based upon attitudes towards one's own capacity (self-efficacy)
- Theory of planned behavior
- Used: Demonstration of the possibility, widespread potential and social norms that encourage smoking
- Commit Smoking Losenges
- "Yes you can!" campaign
- Modeling Theory
- You will model behavior, do what you see done
- Used: Target adults to help kids, target people around the intended recipient of intervention
- Another good idea would be a Quitting Coach – pair with someone similar who is successful quitting, learn from their actions/mistakes
- Sort of an I Heart Huckabees idea (Jason Schwartzman/Marky Mark)
- Same developer as 3. - Decision whether or not to take action is based upon belief of capability
- Do what people around you do
- Used: Peer education system, but must target key sources of influence, most prominent intervention
- Stages:
- Pre-Contemplation (haven't thought about quitting)
- Contemplation (thinking about quitting)
- Preparation (quit date)
- Action (attempt to quit)
- Maintenance (picking up an aggravating chewing gum habit to stay off cigarettes)
- Used: Quit-line - Get someone to start thinking about quitting, ask questions to assess readiness to quit.
- Provide materials depending on answers
- Precaution-Adoption Process Model
- Pre-contemplation
- Awareness (do you know smoking is bad?)
- Engaged (do you care?)
- Preparation
- Decide to act
- Decide not to act
Therefore our models must not be complete or must not be accurate.
- What's wrong? (Models are wrong.)
- Is the two-week process leading up to this designed to challenge our dogma of education and learning? Could we not have simply said "Look at these. Are they good? Are there problems? Could we do better?" during the first class?
- Or, even better, we could start by learning a good model? This is like learning the four humors before CPR.
