In my final installment of models for health education I will talk about the PEN-3 model.  This model is not as well-known as some of the other models.  However, it has a very important use.  This model helps to identify specific cultural factors that are important to know to implement a health education program with diverse populations.  Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa developed the PEN-3 model in 1990 (Airhihenbuwa, 1990).  The key thing to know about this model is that’s it’s meant for non-Western cultures.  It’s easier to implement a program in cultures closer to our own.  If the culture is vastly different, you first need to understand their motivations.

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The PRECEDE-PROCEED model is probably one of the most talked about in public health.  One of the reasons being that it’s a comprehensive model for developing public health education programs.  There are a lot of arrows showing the relationship between items within a phase and between phases.

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The Planned Approach to Community Health Model was developed in 1983 by the Centers for Disease Control.  State and Local Health Departments use this model to develop community-based health education programs (Kreuter, 1992).  The model is a cycle of five steps that keep going as the created program becomes something of a sustainable activity.

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The Transtheoretical Model or Stages of Change was developed by James O. Prochaska and Carlo Di Clemente in 1977.  It outlines the different stages a person goes through to make a health behavior change, hence the reason it is also called “Stages of Change”.  It starts by the person not being ready to make a change to the final stage of dropping the old behavior in favor of a new one.  Here is what the model looks like:

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A new study was published in PLoS Currents Outbreaks that surveyed a sample of people in Florida to get their thoughts on the use of genetically modified (GM) mosquitos.  In a nutshell, many of those surveyed were skeptical of their use.   The reason they cited were concerns about the possible negative effect on humans and the ecosystem.  What was interesting about this finding is the less worried someone was about mosquito-borne disease, the less likely they were to accept the use of GM mosquitos.  The main outcome of the study was to further risk communication and education about the use of GM mosquitos.  What does this mean, exactly?

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One of the most common questions I am asked in terms of my research is “Why didn’t you study [insert group]?”  It can be hard to understand why I would pick a certain group to study and not others.  First, when you are doing any scientific research project, you have to narrow your focus.  In this case I narrowed my field to one type of immigrant.  To include other types of immigrants would have taken too long to pursue.  It’s better to focus your study and get better results for one group than it is to do too many groups at once.  Not saying you can’t, but I wanted to graduate in some reasonable time frame and I did not have grant funding to pay for my time.

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