Abstract
Owing to their enormous capacity to improve health and save lives, public health researchers and practitioners have worked on developing effective frameworks for the optimization of health promotion strategies. A multilevel focus, as exemplified by the Socio-Ecological Model (SEM), is one common denominator among these frameworks. The SEM highlights important social and ecological influences on health behavior by delineating the different levels of influence. These include public policy, organizational, community, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels, which, when considered during the development of health promotion campaigns—especially those that focus on health education—strengthen the influence of that campaign on targeted behaviors. However, the SEM lacks a complimenting framework for understanding the role of conventional and unconventional approaches to health education; that is, how to design a health education intervention that considers both the context, such as the social and ecological levels of influence, and the best approaches for developing and delivering the health education in a manner that optimizes its effectiveness in today’s modern and increasingly diverse world. Addressing this gap, the current article presents an integrative Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model (MMHEM), which incorporates three key domains—(1) Art (innovativeness/creativity), (2) Culture (cultural tailoring), and (3) Science (evidence-based), while promoting the importance of considering the socio-ecological levels of influence on targeted behaviors. Using a successful health education intervention, called the Hip Hop Stroke, we deconstruct the Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model and discuss its potential role as a guide for developing public health education interventions.
Highlights
Mechanisms behind effective public health education remain complex, and the best practices are seldom implemented
As presented in the Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model (MMHEM), in order to enhance the quality of evidence-based methodology, (a) scientific advisory boards can help provide essential expertise regarding the particular health problem being targeted by the health education program; (b) literature reviews/subject matter experts can help enhance the understanding of specific elements of the problem; (c) best practices derived from successful programs should be implemented; (d) researchers and practitioners should employ conceptual frameworks to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of their interventions; and, (e) multidisciplinary teams can be formed to provide a broad scope of knowledge and skills necessary for different components of effective health education
Hip Hop Stroke (HHS) is an example of a public health education intervention that deploys art, culture, and science across multiple levels of an individuals’ physical and social environment
Summary
Mechanisms behind effective public health education remain complex, and the best practices are seldom implemented. Focuses on utilizing different forms of art and entertainment as educational and communication tools These frameworks represent valid and well-established approaches to health education, they tend to focus on constructs governing the “why/what” of human behavior, and lack specific strategies to help guide the design and implementation of effective health campaigns, which we refer to as the “how” of health education. Socio-Ecological Model (SEM) focuses on which level of the human environment (i.e., physical and social or “who/where”) needs targeting, it does not address the crucial question of “how” public health practitioners can best design effective health education strategies that permeate these levels. The “why/what”, which reflects mechanisms governing human behavior, is often the target of existing health behavior models (e.g., attitudes, motivation, normative beliefs, self-efficacy, social norms, social support, etc.); the “who/where” reflects the levels of influence as outlined by the Socio-Ecological Model (e.g., family, community, organizations, public policies); and, the “how”. HHS has been shown to be effective in a large randomized clinical trial (RCT) [25]
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