The Journal of Preventive Medicine’s (AJPM) March 2008 issue is a special issue on multiple behavior change. All three articles submitted by Pro-Change were accepted and appear in this special issue.
Until recently, there was no programmatic research demonstrating the effectiveness of interventions designed to simultaneously change two or more target behaviors. In this special issue, the Pro-Change team demonstrated simultaneous behavior change applying tailored interventions based on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM).
The first article features an intervention for healthy weight management. The study demonstrated the ability of tailored feedback to improve healthy eating, exercise, weight, and managing emotional distress on a population basis. The treatment produced the highest population impact to date on multiple health risk behaviors.
The study in the second article was designed to compare the initial efficacy of Motivational Interviewing (MI) and Pro-Change’s online TTM-tailored communications on four health risk factors (inactivity, weight, stress, and smoking) to a brief Health Risk Intervention (HRI) delivered by Quality Health Solutions in a worksite sample. The results found that the MI and TTM groups, when compared with an HRI-only group, had significantly more participants in the Action stage for exercise and effective stress management and significantly fewer risk behaviors at six months. This was the first study to demonstrate that MI and online TTM could produce significant multiple behavior changes.
The third article features measurement development on the topic of childhood and adolescent obesity prevention. Nationwide samples of students in grades 4 through 12 completed self-administered questionnaires assessing TTM constructs and behavioral indicators for physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and limiting television time. Analyses were conducted to compare the prevalence of students at-risk for the target behaviors across the age groups and to examine the interrelationships of the target behavior risks. Across the three age groups, physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption declined, while limiting TV time increased. Across all three samples, being at-risk for one behavior almost always significantly increased the odds of being at-risk for another behavior. The findings of this study provide further evidence for the need for early promotion of healthy lifestyle behaviors.
“Given a window of intervention opportunity, a higher impact paradigm is to target multiple behaviors,” states Janice M. Prochaska, president & CEO of Pro-Change Behaviors Systems, Inc. “Our growing evidence supports the ability of multiple risk behavior change interventions to produce increased impacts on public health.”
Visit our evidence page for a sampling of our in-depth research and publications.