Designing Interventions to Promote Community Health: A Multilevel, Stepwise Approach

Book excerpt: This book articulates a clear four-phase framework for planning, creating, implementing, and evaluating multilevel community health promotion interventions that target individual, physical, and social environments. It breaks down each of the four phases into detailed yet easy-to-follow steps that review important procedures, like identifying a behaviorally based problem within a community, identifying the underlying behavioral determinants to be targeted by the intervention, selecting intervention techniques that target those determinants, and evaluating outcomes to modify the intervention as needed. Guidelines for engaging community members in the design process, building teams, developing a manual of procedures, conducting pilot studies, and other important intervention components are also reviewed. Also reviewed are instructions for applying this framework to the adaption of existing interventions to new contexts. Feature boxes highlight key information and practical takeaways for students and interventionists. Detailed case examples that highlight various health promotion efforts bring the four-phase framework to life, including a recurring example about reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages in middle-school students that follows the process from beginning to end.