By now you should have identified a health promotion program that you will investigate during this course and at least one public health professional involved in this program whom you can interview about it. Refer to the  Application area for guidelines on selecting this program and the interviewee(s).

For this week's Application Assignment, you will need to find out enough information about the program, through a combination of independent research and interviewing, to describe the program's purpose, stakeholders, expected outcomes, and any planning models that were used and/or might well have been used. In acquiring this information, you will be taking the kinds of steps that any evaluator would take to learn about a program. (See "Preparing for Your Interview" below.)

This part of the assignment should be 2- to 3-pages.

Provide the following information about your selected health promotion program.

Describe your selected program and identify its purpose.

Who are the critical stakeholders for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of this program?

List important input and throughput elements for the program. (Program input elements are resources and raw materials. They include clients or beneficiaries of services provided, staff, material resources, facilities, and equipment. Throughput elements are the activities implemented by the program to promote health or prevent disease, injury, disability, or death in the target population.)
Describe the outcomes the program is intended to produce. Outcomes may concern these and other types of variables relevant to health promotion: cognitive, skill, psychosocial, behavioral, environmental, or health.

Critically appraise the use of a planning model for this program by addressing the following:

o Was a planning model used by the program planners? If so, which one? Based on the principles of planning and your knowledge of this model, discuss how well you think it was applied and explain your reasons for this assessment.

o If no planning model was used, explain why not. Then, based on the principles of planning and your knowledge of planning models, identify a planning model that you think would have been appropriate for this program, provide a rationale for your choice, and describe any challenges you might anticipate in applying it in this instance.
Whether or not the program made use of a planning model, make sure to demonstrate in this section your specific knowledge of at least one planning model-the one that was used by the program or one that you would recommend in this instance.

Preparing for Your Interview

In order to gather information to complete this Application Assignment, learn as much about this program as you can on your own through Web searches and other available means. Then create a list of interview questions to pose to your interviewee to fill in any gaps in your knowledge. The focus of this interview should be on ascertaining the program's purpose, critical stakeholders, various inputs and throughputs, and the approach that was taken to plan the program. Make sure you find out about how any planning model was applied.

Before conducting this and all later interviews, you should carefully prepare your list of questions. You will want to be professional in all your interactions and respectful of your interviewee's time. When conducting the interviews by phone or in person, be sure that you understand and record their responses at the time so you do not need to contact them later with unnecessary follow-up questions. As you prepare for these interviews, bring to mind any communication strategies and guidelines you have learned during your coursework that you can apply here.

Part 2 - PRECEDE Model

In your Week 3 Discussion, you described the needs assessment steps that were conducted by the planners of your selected health promotion program. For this Application Assignment, you are asked to use the PRECEDE model to help frame the health problem that your health promotion focuses on.

Begin by reviewing the explanations of the PRECEDE-PROCEED model on pages 20-25 of the McKenzie textbook and in Week 2's media program on the model. Focus in particular on the "PRECEDE" portion of the model (Phases 1-4). Consider how you would use PRECEDE when developing a program such as the one you are investigating. What steps would you need to take to conduct those various assessments?

Then review the Application Assignment guidelines below. You may use this list of questions when interviewing your program contact person, or develop your own interview questions so that you can more fully understand which of the various ecological levels were assessed and how. Keep in mind that not all programs use this particular planning model, so you may discover that some of these assessments were not conducted. The purpose of your using the PRECEDE model here is primarily as a learning tool to help you map the ways in which the various ecological levels are associated with your health problem.
This part of the assignment should be 2- to 3-pages. On the basis of this interview and other means of gathering information about this program, respond to the following:

At what phase of the PRECEDE model does your selected program enter? Why did the program enter at this phase?

What are the behaviors associated with the health problem?

What are the environmental factors associated with the health problem?

What are the predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors that influence Phase 3 of PRECEDE?

Based on your understanding of the program, do you think that the program is effectively addressing the factors that are responsible for the health problem? Explain your reasons.