Improving the health of the public: a behavior-change perspective

Abstract

Improving the health of the public: a behavior-change perspectiveThis issue of Health Education Research provides 15 articles prepared by more than 40 researchers, primarily in the US, as part of an initiative to improve the science and the art of health promotion, largely from an individual behavior-change perspective.With funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Heart Association, these projects, known collectively as the Behavior Change Consortium (BCC), represent an effort to expand health behavior-change research on such contemporary threats to health as tobacco dependence, lack of physical activity and poor diets.In addition to targeting multiple behavior change, the approaches described in this collection employ diverse theoretical perspectives, some of which are new to the field.The rationale behind the BCC undertaking, as well as its long-term goals, are competently described in the introductory articles by Solomon and Kingston (Solomon and Kingston, 2002) and by Ory et al. (Ory et al., 2002).Moreover, the summary article by Nigg et al. (Nigg et al., 2002) reviews some trans-study issues that the BCC initiative is attempting to address, issues that virtually all researchers in this arena confront.Hopefully, the lessons learned from the BCC undertaking will lead not only to more effective health-promotion programs, but also to more effective methods for mounting research in the area of behavior change.The Editors of Health Education Research were interested in publishing the articles in this collection because they provided, among other things, an opportunity to have some of the leading individual behavior-change researchers in the US describe in detail how they used theory to inform their programs.Accumulating analytical work, in particular formal statistical meta-analyses, suggests that at least in some health behavior domains, theoretically informed programs are more effective than those that are not theory informed (Ratner et al., 2001).