健康行為與促進

Health behavior is key to public health, but people think that human behavior is hard to change! We need innovative ways of health behavior promotion, which depends on good understanding of the drivers of healthy and unhealthy behaviors. In this course, students will learn health behaviors theories that are foundations of health promotion and disease prevention, and apply the theories to develop strategies and techniques that promote health behaviors and evaluate the impacts. By the end of the course, students should understand theories, concepts and models from a range of social and behavioral disciplines that are used in public health practices, and apply these theories, concepts and models to: - Identify social, economic and behavioral factors that affect health of individuals and populations. - Effectively communicate social and behavioral science concepts with other public health practitioners and lay audiences. - Specify multiple targets and levels of intervention for social and behavioral science program and/or policies. - Apply behavioral models/theories and evidence-based approaches to solving public health problems. - Compare and describe the merits of social and behavioral science intervention and policies. - Design steps and procedures for the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health programs, policies and interventions.

Participation/discussion: 30% Health behavior promotion project: Checkpoint presentations 30%, Midterm report 20%; final report 20% The project is a team work. Please choose a health topic and an associated health behavior of interest, and then design an intervention program for improving the behavioral outcomes in a specific target population/setting. The purposes of checkpoints are to assist you catch up the course progress and provide opportunities to apply the theories. Checkpoint 1: Decide what health topic and health behaviors you are going to study. Decide target population. Provide the rationale and justification of your decisions. Choose an individual health behavior theory/model and fit the health behavior of interest to the theory/model. Checkpoint 2: Suppose your team will have a limited fund for a health behavior promotion project. Based on this behavior theory/model, design an intervention to promote the health behavior. Checkpoint 3: Make an evaluation plan on your intervention. Midterm report (Due on 1/30): Analyze a published paper that applied a behavioral model/theory to develop a health promotion program of your team’s topic. Every team member should analyze a different paper. Analyze the paper from the aspects: 1) population, 2) health behavior, 3) theories/models, 4) program contents, 5) what you have learned from this paper, esp. about your final project. By ‘analyze’, please think critically the reasons of the study’s decisions, and compare synthetically between your checkpoint 1 and the paper. Final report (Due on 2/18): In this written paper, the student should, but not limited to, (1) justify your choice of the health behavior and the target population, (2) design a theory-based health intervention/policy, (3) review literature and summarize how the behavioral theory was applied to address other health issues, (4) make an evaluation plan on the proposed intervention/policy, (5) justify the implementation cost will not exceed the budget plan, (6) references. Final report format: - Every student prepares his/her own report in Chinese. - Do not exceed 5 pages (A4, double-spaced, 12 font-size).

1. Glanz et al (ed.) (2015) Health Behavior: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5th Ed. Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 978-1-118-62898-0 2. Assigned readings listed in the syllabus.