Behavior Change Approach in Health Promotion

Health Education

• Health Education is an active learning process that aims to favorably change attitudes and influence behavior.
• It is a part of the health promotion program, which combines learning experiences to encourage people to want to be healthy, know how to stay healthy, and do what they can to maintain health.

Key Principles

• Credibility: The degree to which the message is perceived as trustworthy by the receiver.
• Interest: Health Educators should identify the "felt needs" of the people and prepare a program that they can actively participate in.
• Participation: Encourages people to take part in the program, leading to their acceptance of the activities.
• Motivation: The process of encouraging people to want to be healthy, increasing their desire to achieve and maintain health.
• Comprehension: The level of understanding of the people who received health education, which should be determined by the Health Educators.
• Reinforcement: Repetition is necessary in health education, as it helps people to understand new ideas or practice better.

The Behavior Change Approach

• Self-empowerment of the client is central to this approach, valuing them as equals with knowledge, skills, and abilities to contribute to their health.
• Clients have the right to control their own health destinies.

Educational Theorists

Jean Piaget

• Cognitive Development Theory: How a child constructs a mental model of the world.
• Disagreed with the idea that intelligence is a fixed trait, regarding cognitive development as a process that occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Ego-Reality

• Oral Stage: Birth to 1 year, characterized by sucking, biting, and breastfeeding.
• Anal Stage: 1 to 3 years, characterized by bowel and bladder control.
• Phallic stage: 3 to 6 years, characterized by masturbation.
• Latent stage: 6 to puberty, libido is inactive.
• Genital Stage: Puberty to death, characterized by maturing sexual interests.

Jerome Bruner

• Spiral Curriculum: Complex topics can be taught to young children if structured and presented in the right way.
• Revisiting educational topics over time, with each revisit providing deeper knowledge of the topic.

Benjamin Bloom

• Mastery Learning Theory: The focus of instruction should be the time required for different students to learn the same material.
• Hierarchy of Needs: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

Howard Gardner

• Multiple Intelligences Theory: Differentiates human intelligence into specific modalities, including:
  • Verbal-Linguistic (word smart)
  • Musical (Music smart)
  • Bodily-Kinesthetic (body smart)
  • Visual-Spatial (Picture smart)

Abraham Maslow

• Hierarchy of Needs: Physiological, Safety, Love & Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization.