PSY 225: Interventions for Health Behavior Change
Fridays, 9-11:50 am, 5461 Franz
Instructor: Traci Mann, Ph.D.
Office: 8441a Franz
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 2-3 pm
Class Format
This course is a graduate seminar. Undergraduates are accepted based on space constraints and the satisfaction of certain prerequisites. Because this course is a seminar, its success is based on both the efforts of your instructor and on the efforts of the participants: We will be learning together. To help stack the deck toward a successful course, I am making discussion participation and discussion leading worth a fairly large part of your grade.
Each week you will be responsible for reading the articles in the reader. There are usually three articles per week, and I have made great efforts to make sure that the readings are not both too long and too difficult. The reader is available at Course Reader Material at 1141 Westwood Blvd (between Kinross and Lindbrook). The phone number there is 443-3303.
Class Participation
Part of your grade will be based on class participation. To prepare, you should carefully read and be familiar with the assigned readings. You may also want to make a note of a few issues or questions that you would like to discuss. To earn the maximum amount of points for participation, you need not (indeed, you should not) dominate discussion. You merely need to contribute to the discussion each session and help it move forward. While I strongly encourage you to do all the readings, if for some reason you have not thoroughly read all the articles on a particular week, you should not feel that you cannot add to the discussion. You can and you should.
Leading Class Discussion
Each class member will be required to lead class discussion one time during the quarter (or two times if enrollment is low). You will choose your session on the first day. Leading class discussion is more difficult than most people realize. I encourage you to prepare thoroughly for this role. First, consider how you want to organize class. Depending on the nature of the readings, class might be ideally divided up into separate sections for each article, or in other cases, the articles can all be discussed together. However you decide, you are in charge of the clock, of keeping discussion on track, and of preventing ridiculous digressions and encouraging useful ones. I’ll be there to help out, of course, and I won’t let anything awful happen.
I find it helpful if the leader starts with an overview that includes a summary of the readings. Often in seminars people jump right to the critiquing and shredding of the readings before everyone in the room is clearly up to speed on what the readings say. I encourage you to allot a reasonable amount of time to just reviewing what the readings are arguing before opening the floor for criticism. Once everyone is clear on what the readings say, you can move the discussion to a few key questions or thoughts that you want the discussion to be structured around. To get people talking (remember, the class meets at 9 am), you might want to start with a discussion question that allows people to talk about their personal experiences. Then you can move into the more technical issues.
Feel free to be creative. You may want to try to structure a discussion around solving a fairly specific problem. The topics of this course lend themselves well to this type of discussion, in which the goal is to design an experiment. For some topics it may even be possible for us to collect some data on the spot.
It is often useful to prepare a handout with bullet points of discussion questions or topics. The hand-out might also contain a summary of the readings. This could help structure discussion. If you do prepare a handout, I will be happy to make copies of it for you the day before class.
You will be graded on your leadership of discussion. Don’t worry – I will be able to tell if you did a good job, even if your classmates let you down by not having done the reading very carefully. (But they won’t do that, right?)
Because I want you to take this responsibility seriously and to be creative, leading discussion will be worth a rather large proportion of your course grade (see below).
Reaction Papers
Four of the ten weeks of the term you will be expected to turn in a short reaction paper on the assigned readings from that week. You may choose which four weeks you will do this assignment. Papers will be due at the beginning of class, and will not be accepted late. Each paper should be approximately 2-3 pages, double-spaced. The purpose of these papers is twofold: First, they should help you read the weekly assignments critically and thoroughly, and second, they should help generate discussion. I will comment on the papers and grade them.
A reaction paper features your intellectual reaction to a topic covered in the course reader. A "topic" can be a phenomenon, a theory, a concept, an experiment, and so forth. The ideal start is to think about which issues in that week’s readings have grabbed, bothered, or puzzled you. Once you have an idea for a topic, choose the type of paper you want to write. You may critique an article you read; propose a new experiment that would clarify open questions; or apply issues or comments from previous sessions to the current readings. You may start with your own everyday observations and develop a theoretical analysis; or you may start with a theoretical prediction and apply it to your own life. All papers should be short and to the point. So tell your reader what you are planning to do in the first paragraph. Then, in the remaining two or three pages, implement this plan. No matter what type of paper you choose to write, you must clearly go beyond summarizing other people's thoughts. A mere summary of the reading material is not acceptable.
Final Project
The class will do a final project together. The project is a writing project. As a group, we will write a review paper of models of health behavior change, and we will analyze which models are most appropriate and effective for which particular health behaviors, based on numerous criteria. For some reason, there is no paper that reviews the models and tries to make sense of when each model would be most effective. I want this paper to be a single definitive paper that finally puts each model in its place and makes sense of the massive messy literature on this topic. Each student in class will write a section of the larger paper. We will break this project down into parts during the third week of class, and each member of class will be responsible for one part. We will have deadlines for outlines and drafts of each section.
Grading
Your grade will be based on the following items:
- Your final paper30%
- Your reaction papers20% (4 papers @ 5% each)
- Leading discussion25%
- Class participation25%
Readings
1/12: Week 1: Overview
1/19: Week 2: Individual Models: Health Belief Model and Theory of Reasoned Action
Rosenstock (1990). The Health Belief Model: Explaining health behavior through expectancies. In Glantz, K. (ed.) Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Aiken, West, Woodward, Reno, & Reynolds (1994). Increasing screening mammography in asymptomatic women: Evaluation of a second generation, theory-based program. Health Psychology, 13, 526-538.
Fisher, Fisher, & Rye (1995). Understanding and promoting AIDS-preventive behavior: Insights from the Theory of Reasoned Action. Health Psychology, 14, 255-264.
Sutton, McVey, & Glanz (1999). A comparative test of the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior in the prediction of condom use intentions in a national sample of English young people. Health Psychology, 18, 72-81.
1/26: Week 3: Social Cognitive Learning Models
Bandura (1998). Health promotion from the perspective of Social Cognitive theory. Psychology and Health, 13, 623-649.
Kirby, Barth, Leland, & Fetro (1991). Reducing the risk: Impact of a new curriculum on sexual risk-taking. Family Planning Perspectives, 23, 253-263.
Schwarzer (1999). Self-regulatory processes in the adoption and maintenance of health behaviors. The role of optimism, goals, and threats. Journal of Health Psychology, 4, 115-128.
2/2: Week 4: Motivational Models
Fisher, Fisher, Misovich, Kimble, & Malloy (1996). Changing AIDS risk behavior: effects of an intervention emphasizing AIDS risk reduction information, motivation, and behavioral skills in a college student population. Health Psychology, 15, 114-123.
Sherman, Nelson, & Steele (2000). Do messages about health risks threaten the self? Increasing the acceptance of threatening health messages via self-affirmation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1046-1058.
Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow (1994). Inducing hypocrisy as a means of encouraging young adults to use condoms. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 116-128
2/9: Week 5: Self-Regulation Models
Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice (1994). Introduction: Self-regulation failure in social and theoretical context. In Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation. New York: Academic Press.
Carver & Scheier (1982). Control Theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 111-135.
2/16: Week 6: Stage Models
Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to addictive behaviors. American Psychologist, 47, 1102-1114.
Catania, Kegeles, & Coates (1990). Towards an understanding of risk behavior: An AIDS Risk Reduction Model (ARRM). Health Education Quarterly, 17, 53-72.
Peterson et al (1996). Evaluation of an HIV risk reduction intervention among African-American homosexual and bisexual men. AIDS, 10, 319-325.
2/23: Week 7: Sociological Models
Friedman, DesJarlais, & Ward (1994). Social models for changing health-relevant behavior. In DiClemente & Peterson (Eds.): Preventing AIDS: Theories and Methods of Behavioral Intervention. NY: Plenum Press.
Kelly et al (1991). HIV risk behavior reduction following intervention with key opinion leaders of population: An experimental analysis. American Journal of Public Health, 81, 168-171.
Hansen & Graham (1991). Preventing alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette use among adolescents: Peer pressure resistance training versus establishing conservative norms. Preventive Medicine, 20, 414-430.
3/2: Week 8: Community-Level Interventions and Mass-Media Campaigns
Repucci, Woolard, & Fried (1999). Social, community, and preventive interventions. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 387-418.
Meyer, Nash, McAlister, Maccoby, & Farquhar (1980). Skills training in a cardiovascular health education campaign. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 48, 129-142.
Leventhal, Safer, Cleary, & Gutmann (1980). Cardiovascular risk modification by community-based programs for life-style change: Comments on the Stanford Study. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 48, 150-158.
Meyer, Maccoby, & Farquhar (1980). Reply to Kasl and Leventhal et al. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 48, 159-163.
3/9: Week 9: Failed Interventions
McCord (1978). A thirty-year follow-up of treatment effects. American Psychologist, 284-289.
Clayton, Cattarello, & Johnstone (1996). The effectiveness of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Project DARE): 5-year follow-up results. Preventive Medicine, 25, 307-318.
Lynam et al (1999). Project DARE: No effects at 10-year follow-up. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 590-593.
3/16: Week 10: Unintended Consequences of Interventions
Finckenauer (1999). Scared straight and the panacea phenomenon. Selected sections, pp 19-22, 83-89.
Lewis (1983). Scared straight. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 10, 209-226.
Schulz & Hanusa (1978). Long-term effects of control and predictability-enhancing interventions: Findings and ethical issues. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 36, 1194-1201
Mann et al (1997). Are two interventions worse than none? Joint primary and secondary prevention of eating disorders in college females. Health Psychology, 16, 215-225.