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

This book articulates a clear four-phase process for planning, creating, implementing, and evaluating multilevel community health promotion interventions using a framework focusing on determinants from the individual, physical, and social environments. It breaks down each phase into detailed yet easy-to-follow steps that review important procedures, like identifying a behaviorally based problem within a community, choosing the underlying behavioral determinants to be targeted by the intervention, selecting intervention components and strategies, and evaluating outcomes to improve and further disseminate the intervention. Guidelines for engaging community members in the entire process, building teams, developing a manual of procedures, conducting pilot studies, and the importance of formative and process evaluation are reviewed as well. Also presented are instructions for adapting interventions for new communities. 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 design process to life, including a recurring example about a school-based intervention to reduce student consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages that follows the process from beginning to end. Read more