Assignment: Public Health Actions
It is important to note that a wide variety of demographic (i.e., age, gender, ethnicity, race), social and psychological (i.e., personality, social status, group pressure), and structural variables (i.e., prior experience with the disease, knowledge about the health condition) also may influence people’s perceptions and have an impact on their health behaviors. Ways that these constructs can be applied are described in Table 6.2.
The HBM can be applied to multicultural health in several ways. For example, if a person has a fatalistic perception of how disease develops, the program planner should work with that ideology because that person’s idea about perceived susceptibility would be very different from that of a person with a Western perspective.
PRECEDE–PROCEED Framework The PRECEDE–PROCEED framework, illustrated in Figure 6.3, is an approach to planning that examines the factors that contribute to behavior change. PRECEDE is an acronym for Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational/Ecological Diagnosis and Evaluation, and PROCEED is an acronym for Policy, Regulatory, and Organizational Constructs in Educational and Environmental Development (McKenzie, Neiger, & Thackeray, 2009).
TABLE 6.2 Applications of the Health Belief Model
Source: Adapted from The Communication Initiative Network (2003).
The factors that contribute to behavior change are described as follows:
Predisposing factors. The individual’s knowledge, attitudes, behavior, beliefs, and values before the intervention that affect their willingness to change
Enabling factors. Factors in the environment or community of an individual that facilitate change
FIGURE 6.3 PRECEDE–PROCEED Model. Source: Reprinted with permission from The Community Toolbox (2007).
Reinforcing factors. The positive or negative effects of adopting the behavior that influence continuing the behavior
The PRECEDE part of the model entails the planning steps that should occur prior to the intervention, and the PROCEED component includes the phases that should occur during and after the intervention.
Evaluating Your Multicultural Health Program Effective program evaluation is a systematic way to improve and account for public health actions by involving procedures that are useful, feasible, ethical, and accurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ([CDC] 1999) developed a framework to guide public health professionals in using program evaluations. It is a practical, nonprescriptive tool designed to summarize and organize the essential elements of effective program evaluation (see Figure 6.4).
The framework is composed of six steps that must be taken in any evaluation. They are starting points for tailoring an evaluation to a particular public health effort at a particular time. Because the steps are all interdependent, they might be encountered in a nonlinear sequence; however, an order exists for fulfilling each—earlier steps provide the foundation for subsequent progress (see Figure 6.4).
FIGURE 6.4 Recommended framework for program evaluation. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1999).
Evaluation is a large subject and will not be covered in detail here because there are many other resources on the topic. For general information on public health evaluation, we suggest that you review the CDC (1999) document. There are numerous other sources as well.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.