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Assignment Description

Full description in attachment below.

For this assignment you will conduct a behavioral analysis of the behavior you proposed to intervene in based on the preparatory work you completed for your problem analysis paper and choose the target audience for your health communication campaign.

Behavioral Analysis

The primary goal of the behavioral analysis is to form an understanding of the factors that will cause people to perform the behavior you recommend for them. Some of these factors may be internal to the individual (e.g., the extent to which a person possesses the knowledge, skills, beliefs and motivation to perform the behavior); others may be external (e.g., the presence of absence of social pressure or external incentives for performing the behavior). Your task is to sort out the relative importance of these factors in influencing the behavior and to identify the most salient (or important) factor that will be the focus of your communication strategy (which you will develop in the next paper). To this end, you will examine the existing scientific literature on this topic for clues about which factors (internal and/or external) appear to be the most important determinates of the behavior. Specifically, you should look for salient cognitions (e.g., attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and/or feelings) that have been shown to be associated with the behavior since, unlike objective conditions over which people have no control, cognitions can be altered through strategic communication alone. You will next compare the ability of two or more behavior change theories to provide a good (logical, evidence-based) template for changing this behavior based on the insights gained from the literature.

The outcomes of your behavioral analysis should be a clear set of recommendations, or strategic communication objectives, regarding the focus of your communication strategy. For example, you may determine that people at-risk for skin cancer do not properly protect themselves against sun exposure because (a) they do not believe that they are personally susceptible to skin cancer, (b) they have positive (but false) expectations of rewards from sun exposure, or simply because (c) they are misinformed or confused about the level of protection provided by commercially available products. Accordingly, your intervention’s communication strategy will target these perceptions under the assumption that changing these will cause people to change their behavior.

Target Audience

Once you have a sense of what needs to change (that is, the specific cognitive elements you will try to influence through your intervention), you need to determine who needs to change. In most cases, your primary target audience will be the group of individuals who are at-risk for the disease or condition you are attempting to prevent. Depending on the population’s exposure to a particular risk, your primary target audience may be composed of all members (as is the case with flu prevention) or a distinct group of members (such as women, in the context of breast cancer prevention). Your communication strategy will focus on changing salient cognitions among members of this group. However, there are instances in which you may want to target a secondary target audience, or a group of people that can influence or otherwise enable the behavior you are promoting to your primary target audience. Consider the case of children and parents. Since