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

by Leslie Ann Lytle (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Leslie Ann Lytle, PhD, is an adjunct professor in the department of health behavior at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For over 25 years, her research and community-based interventions have focused on the health promotion of youth and young adults, particularly preventing obesity and promoting healthful diets and physical activity through school, family, and environmental approaches. She has been a principal investigator on several large National Institutes of Health multilevel intervention studies, including CATCH, TEENS, TAAG and CHOICES and is recognized as an expert in designing intervention studies both in the United States and internationally.