Promoting Behavior Change Among Working-Class, Multiethnic Workers: Results of the Healthy Directions—Small Business Study

Abstract

The social-context model holds promise for reducing disparities in health behaviors. Further research is needed to improve the effectiveness of the intervention.

Advances in multiple health behavior change research

“…Such an undertaking requires balancing several concepts such as participant burden for multiple assessments, prioritizing the presentation of multiple behavior strategies, etc. Researchers have concluded that multiple simultaneous behavior change interventions are promising for addictive behaviors and for multiple cancer prevention behaviors including diet, physical activity, and obesity prevention [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In this Special Section, Velicer et al [25] describe a large intervention trial that examined the effectiveness of two different computer-delivered interventions designed to influence multiple behaviors in middle school students: The first intervention targeted multiple substance use behaviors; the other targeted energy balance behaviors.…”

Sociodemographic and social contextual predictors of multiple health behavior change: data from the Healthy Directions–Small Business study

“…The focus on multivitamin use was in response to epidemiologic evidence at the time of the study highlighting the need for adequate folate intake [21]. The Healthy Directions-Small Business study showed greater improvements for the intervention group compared to the control group for each behavior, with multivitamin use and physical activity reaching statistical significance [15].…”

“…Written materials were translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Vietnamese to accommodate non-native English speakers. Specific intervention process and protocol details beyond the focus of this paperpredictors of multiple health behavior change-have been published previously [6,15,23].…”

“…Blue-collar worksites are important settings for health promotion efforts for various reasons, chief among them the ability to reach large populations of high-risk individuals who share a daily occupational context and working class social position [6,15]. While worksite programs already play an important role in addressing disparities in health-promoting behaviors by occupational class [15,16], many research-based worksite programs adopt a singlebehavior approach or do not report analyses across the targeted behaviors [10,17].…”

“…While worksite programs already play an important role in addressing disparities in health-promoting behaviors by occupational class [15,16], many research-based worksite programs adopt a singlebehavior approach or do not report analyses across the targeted behaviors [10,17]. While these data yield important information about effective worksite interventions, behavior by behavior, a gap remains in understanding how multiple health behavior change could be used to optimize overall intervention impact.…”