Public health theory links ... helpful for social and behavioral students (and everyone else!)

I'm a big advocate of using theory to create public health programs, instead of just trusting your "gut." Too many public health practitioners, who are poorly trained in theory and evidence-based approaches, put together programs like this: FocusDriven that are largely designed to appeal to our emotions and fear of physical injury. Although I suppose these worked at one time, campaigns such as these slip out of our conciousness the minute we navigate to a different page.

With that in mind, I've found some really awesome articles that summarize public health theories relating to behavior change, and I'm going to share them here! Get stoked!

• This article from the National Institutes of Health relates specifically to cancer, but the information can be generalized to most public health practice. This is probably the most practically applicable document I've seen that relates to public health theory.
• Here is a file that summarizes public health theory nicely, including some that you usually don't see, such as Protection Motivation Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model.
• Finally, it's important to recognize that different populations require different theoretical models to inspire interventions. Children are a particularly relevant group because their cognitive abilities differ greatly from those of adults. This article explains a child-specific model that can be used to spark behavior change.

Again, it's important that public health professionals adhere to existing scientific knowledge in crafting campaigns and interventions. Otherwise, taxpayer money and funds from private enterprise are essentially discarded as they are applied to feel-good efforts that really don't fix anything.

I'm continually shocked at the inability of our health community to lay proper foundations for research and intervention. Perhaps this is because many of us in this field are poorly educated about public health, considering the current clinical focus of medical technology today. It's clear that a paradigm shift must occur that stresses true evidence basis instead of self-serving, happiness-inducing, ineffective programming.

This means that we, as public health professionals, must acquire enough knowledge to recognize when something is a bunch of horse hockey. Learn your statistical measures. Understand what total crap looks like. Sources will tell you that D.A.R.E. is an effective program, for example ... but if you actually READ the studies, the evidence for this suddenly vanishes.

Think critically, people.

Bringing it back to the basics

We'll bring back a discussion of Men's Health Week later today, but this morning I wanted to talk a little bit about the use of conceptual models in behavioral health interventions.

I, like many other public health students (I assume), memorize the constructs of a whole bunch of behavioral models during the introductory Social and Behavioral Health class. We have the Trans-Theoretical Model, the Theory of Planned Behavior, Social Cognitive Theory, Health Belief, Risk Perception ... the list goes on (and on and on).

I, also like many other public health students, learn the models, categorize them within my brain, and then promptly forget to actually apply their messages to any of my work. I found this out this morning during my practicum work; my preceptor came to me and said, "Well, you have all this information about distracted driving, and you have this fancy model ... are they related?" And the light bulb went on. Although I had created an outline for my paper that seemed to make sense, it was only loosely related to the theoretical basis I had chosen. *headdesk

This is why I'm happy that they give us preceptors to give us feedback and input about our duties. Otherwise, I'd be making silly mistakes like this for the rest of my career.

It's so important that, as we go down the empirical research path, we consider our theoretical basis. That is, we can't just do a literature review without relating each piece back to its fundamental theory. Drawing conclusions about empirical research is useless unless we can determine how to apply our learning.

Just a little advice for all my fellow PH students out there. Stay tuned for more fun information this afternoon!