In this Study Session, you have learned that:
There are two famous types of models or theories in health education. The first one is the health belief model---used to plan an individual health education in the process of behaviour change. These models mainly consist of the following components or constructs:
- The perceived susceptibility: Perception of an individual being at risk for a particular health problem
- The perceived severity: Perception of an individual that a health problem is very serious
- The perceived benefit: Perception of an individual for certain benefits behind performing a behaviour
- The perceived barriers: Perception of an individual for a particular tangible or psychological barriers that hinder the performance of the desired behaviour
- The perceived self-efficacy: Perception of an individual that he is ready and confident to perform a particular behaviour by his ability.
- Cues to action: Probability of an individual for different sources of information including mass media that motivates him to perform the desired behaviour.
A second very important theory in health education is the theory of adoption of innovation. This theory is very important to plan community level health education with the basic assumption of diffusion of the new ideas and other technologies throughout the community social system or culture. The theory consists of five stages of the innovation adoption processes. These are the following:- Knowledge stage: This stage refers to the simple awareness of the new innovation, and more information is still needed.
- Persuasion: The individual wants more information. They begin to wonder if the innovation can help them. They may actively seek out new information, both from the inside and outside sources.
- Adoption (decision stage): People decide to adopt the innovation. The individual mentally examines the innovation using the information gathered, trying to determine whether it will impact their work and how it will make their effort easier or better.
- Implementation (trial stage): The individual tests the innovation to see if reality matches expectations, usually with small-scale, experimental efforts.
- Confirmation: The individual likes the innovation and adopts it wholeheartedly. It is applied to all areas of relevant use and the individual often becomes a strong advocate for the innovation in the community.
- Moreover, it is always helpful to introduce an innovation into a group of individuals who are ready to accept an innovation and who will provide positive reactions and benefits for early adopters of the innovation. Accordingly, there are different categories of individuals in the community that give response for an innovation:
- Innovators: The first individuals to accept the innovation and who are venturesome, independent, risky and daring.
- Early adopters: These are the next individuals to accept the innovation and are very interested in the innovation but they are not the first to sign up. They wait until the innovators are already involved to make sure the innovation is useful. They are respected by others in the social system and looked at as opinion leaders.
- Early majority: These include very large number of individuals to accept the innovation next to the early adopters. These may be interested in the innovation but will need external motivation to become involved, they will deliberate for some time before making a decision.
- Late majority: These are also very large portion of individuals to accept the innovation and it will take more time to get them involved for they are skeptical and will not adopt an innovation until most people in the social system have done so.
- Laggards: These are the last to accept the innovation because they are very traditional and are suspicious of innovations. Laggards tend to have limited communication networks, so they really do not know much about new things.