behavioural and socio environment model

Behavioural model

Objective: to bring about changes in individual behaviour through changes in individuals’

cognitions.Aims: to increase individual’s knowledge about the causes of health and illness.

Provide appropriate resources and facilities to enable individual change, i.e. day clinics,

support lines. Assumption: humans are rational decision-

makers whose cognitions inform their actions.

Behavioural model

• The goal of this approach is to bring about changes in individual behaviour through changes in the individual’s cognitions. The approach is based upon the assumption that humans are rational decision-makers and therefore relies heavily upon the provision of information about risks and health hazards through the mass media as well as leaflets and posters

Criticisms of the behaviour model

Unable to target the major socio-economic causes of ill health

Operates ‘top-down’- recommendations can be incompatible with community norms, values and practices

Assumes that there is a direct link between knowledge, attitudes and behaviour

Assumes homogeneity among the receivers of health promotion messages

Socio-economic model

Objective: to improve health by addressing socio-economic and environmental causes of ill health.Process: individuals organize and act collectively in order to change their physical and social environments.Aims: to modify social, economic and physical structures that generate ill health.Assumption: communities of individuals share interests that allows them to act collectively.

Socio-economic model

Recognizes the close relationship between individual health and its social and material contexts, which consequently become the target for change.

Individuals act collectively in order to change their environment rather than themselves.

Acts at the interface between the environmental and the behavioural approaches to health

Concerned with the ways in which collectivities can actively intervene to change their physical and social environment.

Criticisms of the socio-environment approach

• vulnerable to lack of funding and to official oppositions

• danger of creeping professionalization

• problematic concept of ‘community