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Context Health communication campaigns including mass media and health-related product distribution have been used to reduce mortality and morbidity through behavior change. The intervention is defined as having two core components reflecting two social marketing principles: (1) promoting behavior change through multiple communication channels, one being mass media, and (2) distributing a free or reduced-price product that facilitates adoption and maintenance of healthy behavior change, sustains cessation of harmful behaviors, or protects against behavior-related disease or injury. Evidence acquisition Using methods previously developed for the Community Guide, a systematic review (search period, January 1980–December 2009) was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of health communication campaigns that use multiple channels, including mass media, and distribute health-related products. The primary outcome of interest was use of distributed health-related products. Evidence synthesis Twenty-two studies that met Community Guide quality criteria were analyzed in 2010. Most studies showed favorable behavior change effects on health-related product use (a median increase of 8.4 percentage points). By product category, median increases in desired behaviors ranged from 4.0 percentage points for condom promotion and distribution campaigns to 10.0 percentage points for smoking-cessation campaigns. Conclusions Health communication campaigns that combine mass media and other communication channels with distribution of free or reduced-price health-related products are effective in improving healthy behaviors. This intervention is expected to be applicable across U.S. demographic groups, with appropriate population targeting. The ability to draw more specific conclusions about other important social marketing practices is constrained by limited reporting of intervention components and characteristics.

Editors’ Note: We invited a sample of AJPM’s Editorial Board, supplement guest editors, and longtime colleagues and contributors to share their experiences and impressions of the impact of AJPM on their respective domains. We were particularly fond of Ken Powell’s analogy to being “tenders of the planted seed”—as planters, weeders, and harvesters—watching and nurturing the growth of AJPM, and have elected to lead with his commentary. In the mid-1940s my brothers and I helped our father tend our victory garden. We were suburbanites and our small garden shared a vacant lot with the concrete foundation of a home abandoned in mid-construction during the Depression. We helped plant, weed, and harvest the crops. I especially liked the tall stalks of sweet corn that grew taller than I was. Many years later, in the mid-1990s, I met a couple of other gardeners: Kevin Patrick and Doug Scutchfield visited the Centers for Disease Control (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to discuss their plans as the editors of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. I was working in a Branch that was trying to understand the public health importance of regular physical activity, and they had the foresight to know we were planting some seeds in an important new area. I’m not sure that I had even heard of AJPM before their visit. A few years later, while the field of physical activity and public health continued to grow, I shifted my focus to violence and injury prevention. Once again, the team of Patrick and Scutchfield recognized the importance of this topic to the field of preventive medicine. By the turn of the century my work had shifted from the national to the state level. I tried to keep up with the literature by reading or scanning articles as I rode the subway to and from work. The Georgia Division of Public Health had no access to a library so I circulated my personal copy of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine to my team in the Chronic Disease and Injury Epidemiology Section because it contained by far the most articles of interest and practical application for us. Isn’t it interesting to watch things grow. Gardens, journals, and the fields of public health and preventive medicine.

Background Increasingly, funders expect that public health researchers will include policy contributions as outcomes. Lack of agreement as to what constitutes a policy contribution of research provides little conceptual or implementation guidance to researchers who lack policy training, as well as to evaluators called on to assess "good" policy contribution. Purpose This study applies a previously developed policy framework to explore potential policy contributions from research conducted by 20 principal investigators of Salud America! , the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Research Network to Prevent Obesity Among Latino Children. Methods The literature-driven "Policy Contribution Spectra" served as the conceptual framework to jointly develop 20 cases of potential policy contribution. Data collection included document reviews and interviews. Data analysis included within- and cross-case analyses, member checking, data triangulation, and expert reviews. Results Plotting all 20 projects on the Policy Contribution Spectra showed projects have the potential to contribute to policy across intervention types (e.g., needs assessment or applied research); levels (e.g., local or state); timing (e.g., before or after policy enactment); and outcomes (e.g., process action or health benefits). Potential policy contributions on the Spectra framework were shown as multidirectional; multilayered (e.g., simultaneous state and local action); and multidimensional (e.g., multiple strategies aimed at multiple stakeholders). Conclusions The Policy Contribution Spectra adds a useful policy lens to existing public health practice by enabling researchers, funders, advocates, and evaluators to visualize, reframe, discuss, and communicate with policymakers and the public to resolve important public health issues.

Over-reliance on decontextualized, standardized implementation of efficacy evidence has contributed to slow integration of evidence-based interventions into health policy and practice. This article describes an “evidence integration triangle” (EIT) to guide translation, implementation, prevention efforts, comparative effectiveness research, funding, and policymaking. The EIT emphasizes interactions among three related components needed for effective evidence implementation: (1) practical evidence-based interventions; (2) pragmatic, longitudinal measures of progress; and (3) participatory implementation processes. At the center of the EIT is active engagement of key stakeholders and scientific evidence and attention to the context in which a program is implemented. The EIT model is a straightforward framework to guide practice, research, and policy toward greater effectiveness and is designed to be applicable across multiple levels—from individual-focused and patient–provider interventions, to health systems and policy-level change initiatives.

Background The FLU–FOBT Program is an intervention in which nurses provide home fecal occult blood tests (FOBTs) to eligible patients during annual influenza vaccination (FLU) campaigns. The effectiveness of the FLU–FOBT Program when implemented during primary care visits has not been extensively studied. Purpose The effectiveness of the FLU–FOBT Program was tested as adapted for use during primary care visits in community clinics serving multiethnic patients with low baseline colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates. Design Randomized clinical trial. During intervention weeks, nurses routinely initiated the offering of FOBT to eligible patients who were given FLU (FLU–FOBT group). During control weeks, nurses provided FOBT with FLU only when ordered by the primary care clinician during usual care (FLU-only group). Setting/participants The study was conducted in six community clinics in San Francisco. Participants were patients aged 50–75 years who received FLU during primary care visits during an 18-week intervention beginning on September 28, 2009. Main outcome measures The primary outcome was the change in CRC screening rates in the FLU–FOBT group compared to the FLU-only group at the end of the study period, on March 30, 2010. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to determine predictors of becoming up-to-date with CRC screening. Results Data were analyzed in 2010. A total of 695 participants received FLU on FLU–FOBT dates, and 677 received FLU on FLU-only dates. The CRC screening rate increased from 32.5% to 45.5% (+13.0 percentage points) in the FLU–FOBT group, and from 31.3% to 35.6% (+4.3 percentage points) in the FLU-only group (p=0.018 for change difference). For those due for CRC screening, the OR for completing CRC screening by the end of the measurement period was 2.22 (95% CI=1.24, 3.95) for the FLU–FOBT group compared to the FLU-only group. Conclusions FLU–FOBT Program participants were twice as likely to complete CRC screening as those receiving usual care. The FLU–FOBT Program is a practical strategy to increase CRC screening in community clinics. Trial registration # NCT01211379

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation requested this utilization-focused evaluation of its Active Living Research (ALR) program. This evaluation reports on the trajectory of influence of past and future ALR outcomes on field-building and policy contributions as well as on possible users of completed and disseminated ALR products.In 2006 and 2007, key-informant interviews were conducted with 136 representatives of first-line potential users of ALR research products, including state physical activity and nutrition program coordinators, policymakers, scientists, and funders. Literature reviews, bibliometric analyses, and document reviews served to describe the context for ALR's work and the ways it could enhance its utility for field building and policymaking.The contributions of ALR to the emerging transdisciplinary field included leadership in the development of measurement tools, epidemiologic studies, implementation research, the translation of research to practice, and the communication of learned lessons to diverse audiences. ALR's contributions to policy discussions were found across a spectrum of policy-development phases that included describing the problem, raising awareness of alternative strategies for increasing physical activity, convening nontraditional partners, and evaluating policy implementation.Policy-relevant research can make contributions to policymakers' thinking but almost never causes a change by itself. Five years after the original authorization of ALR, there is ample evidence of its recognition as a resource by key players, its field-building influence, and its contributions to policy discussions. All these bear promise for a broader contribution to obesity prevention. Recommendations for increasing ALR's impact on policy and practice are offered.

Background Understanding the process by which research is translated into practice is limited. This study sought to examine how interventions change during implementation. Methods Data were collected from July 2005 to September 2007. A real-time and cross-case comparison was conducted, examining ten interventions designed to improve health promotion in primary care practices in practice-based research networks. An iterative group process was used to analyze qualitative data (survey data, interviews, site visits, and project diary entries made by grantees approximately every 2 weeks) and to identify intervention adaptations reported during implementation. Results All interventions required changes as they were integrated into practice. Modifications differed by project and by practice, and were often unanticipated. Three broad categories of changes were identified and include modifications undertaken to accommodate practices' and patients' circumstances as well as personnel costs. In addition, research teams played a crucial role in fostering intervention uptake through their use of personal influence and by providing motivation, retraining, and instrumental assistance to practices. These efforts by the research teams, although rarely considered an essential component of the intervention, were an active ingredient in successful implementation and translation. Conclusions Changes are common when interventions are implemented into practice settings. The translation of evidence into practice will be improved when research design and reporting standards are modified to help quality-improvement teams understand both these adaptations and the effort required to implement interventions in practice.

Efforts at reducing tobacco use in the United States and Canada over the last half century have been amazingly successful. This article examines those efforts in order to identify policies, programs, and practices found useful in tobacco control that might be usefully disseminated to world populations to improve rates of physical activity. Tobacco-control activities began with efforts to influence the individual smoker through public education and counter-advertising. Increasing awareness of the addictive properties of tobacco, industry efforts to manipulate those properties, and to target youth with aggressive advertising, fueled public outrage that supported additional policy changes to include community interventions, legal actions, and restraints against the tobacco industry. The article first examines ways to view the process of transferring knowledge from one enterprise (reducing tobacco consumption) to another (increasing physical activity). Several theories of knowledge generalization and dissemination are explored: transfer, knowledge utilization, application, diffusion, and implementation. The second section identifies the dissemination of tobacco control by means of brief health behavior-change interventions for smoking cessation that have been successfully integrated into primary clinical care. The question of whether similar strategies can be successfully disseminated to increase physical activity is examined in detail. The article then moves on to look at the success of arguably the most successful program in the world at achieving a reduction in tobacco control-the State of California. Finally, we compare and contrast some of the lessons as they have played out in another national context-Canada. In the concluding section, some lessons are identified that we believe may be successfully utilized in societal attempts to increase physical activity in world populations.

Ever the optimists (if not positivists), we continue to look to research to vindicate community health strategies in relation to chronic diseases, complex lifestyle changes and social problems, as they were vindicated in earlier decades against communicable diseases. If we had vaccines to deliver against chronic diseases and substance abuse behaviors, perhaps this hopefulness would be justified. The paper by Hallfors et al. in this issue of the AJPM describes an evaluation of the “Fighting Back” substance abuse initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation. They examined the extent to which coalitions attained selected substance abuse goals in 12 “Fighting Back” communities on which they tracked a variety of indicators through much of the 1990s. They employed a prospective design with multiple comparison communities for each coalition community, quantitative and qualitative methods, and thousands of interviews and observations. Despite all these strengths, lending credibility to the authors’ conclusions, some conceptual and methodologic limitations raise the usual doubts that follow randomized and otherwise controlled community trials, especially when they attempt to isolate one component of complex interventions as a causal explanation for success or failure. Other commentaries and analyses have grappled with the methodologic limitations and pitfalls of such research for purposes of studying community-wide interventions or interventions in communities evaluated at the community level. Some have called specifically into question the limitations of “traditional scientific methodology. . .to capture the outcomes of these complex collaborative organizations” called community coalitions. Others have addressed the problem of unrealistic expectations of community strategies in the short term. Our commentary will address some of the conceptual and procedural issues in understanding community coalitions, best practices, and their evaluation in communities. These are not entirely independent of methodological issues of evaluation, but we believe that we must know what we are attempting to measure and evaluate before we can make strategic and scientific decisions on how best to do so. We will comment, then, on two aspects of the evaluation: (1) the complexity-of-interventions issue in evaluating Fighting Back and the isolation of community coalitions as the common starting point in what became widely varied programs across the communities, and (2) the inflated expectations that follow from isolating community coalitions as the independent variable.

Health communication campaigns including mass media and health-related product distribution have been used to reduce mortality and morbidity through behavior change. The intervention is defined as having two core components reflecting two social marketing principles: (1) promoting behavior change through multiple communication channels, one being mass media, and (2) distributing a free or reduced-price product that facilitates adoption and maintenance of healthy behavior change, sustains cessation of harmful behaviors, or protects against behavior-related disease or injury.Using methods previously developed for the Community Guide, a systematic review (search period, January 1980-December 2009) was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of health communication campaigns that use multiple channels, including mass media, and distribute health-related products. The primary outcome of interest was use of distributed health-related products.Twenty-two studies that met Community Guide quality criteria were analyzed in 2010. Most studies showed favorable behavior change effects on health-related product use (a median increase of 8.4 percentage points). By product category, median increases in desired behaviors ranged from 4.0 percentage points for condom promotion and distribution campaigns to 10.0 percentage points for smoking-cessation campaigns.Health communication campaigns that combine mass media and other communication channels with distribution of free or reduced-price health-related products are effective in improving healthy behaviors. This intervention is expected to be applicable across U.S. demographic groups, with appropriate population targeting. The ability to draw more specific conclusions about other important social marketing practices is constrained by limited reporting of intervention components and characteristics.

The evaluators of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Community Health Promotion Grants Program in the West and the Foundation brought together 21 researchers, funders, and community organizers with a variety of perspectives on community-based health promotion to share what has been learned to date and how that knowledge should be applied in the future. The two-day conference was divided into three sessions, covering conceptual, implementation, and evaluation issues. Specific topics were selected by the organizers with input from participants. Two papers were presented in each session, followed by comments from discussants and a general discussion involving the entire group. The dominant theme of the conference was the relationship between communities and outside institutions, focusing on problems with the current state of relations and how they might be improved in the future. All viewed building partnerships between communities and institutions as a desirable goal; however, the challenges involved in building effective partnerships are considerable and require a substantial investment to make them work. Recommendations that emerged from the discussions included explicitly acknowledging the diverse interests of the parties in community-based programs at the earliest stages of program planning; making a concerted effort to bridge the cultural gaps that exist among the parties; structuring funding to allow enough lead time for partnerships to develop or using social reconnaissance to identify strong existing partnerships; and integrating the evaluation more closely into the process of program development.

Increasingly, funders expect that public health researchers will include policy contributions as outcomes. Lack of agreement as to what constitutes a policy contribution of research provides little conceptual or implementation guidance to researchers who lack policy training, as well as to evaluators called on to assess "good" policy contribution.This study applies a previously developed policy framework to explore potential policy contributions from research conducted by 20 principal investigators of Salud America!, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Research Network to Prevent Obesity Among Latino Children.The literature-driven "Policy Contribution Spectra" served as the conceptual framework to jointly develop 20 cases of potential policy contribution. Data collection included document reviews and interviews. Data analysis included within- and cross-case analyses, member checking, data triangulation, and expert reviews.Plotting all 20 projects on the Policy Contribution Spectra showed projects have the potential to contribute to policy across intervention types (e.g., needs assessment or applied research); levels (e.g., local or state); timing (e.g., before or after policy enactment); and outcomes (e.g., process action or health benefits). Potential policy contributions on the Spectra framework were shown as multidirectional; multilayered (e.g., simultaneous state and local action); and multidimensional (e.g., multiple strategies aimed at multiple stakeholders).The Policy Contribution Spectra adds a useful policy lens to existing public health practice by enabling researchers, funders, advocates, and evaluators to visualize, reframe, discuss, and communicate with policymakers and the public to resolve important public health issues.

Complex and dynamic societal factors continue to challenge the capacity of the social and behavioral sciences in preventive medicine and public health to overcome the most seemingly intractable health problems. This paper proposes a fundamental shift from a research approach that presumes to identify (from highly controlled trials) universally applicable interventions expected to be implemented "with fidelity" by practitioners, to an applied social and behavioral science approach similar to that of engineering. Such a shift would build on and complement the recent recommen- dations of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research and require reformulation of the research-practice dichotomy. It would also require disciplines now engaged in preventive medicine and public health practice to develop a better understanding of systems thinking and the science of application that is sensitive to the complexity, interactivity, and unique elements of community and practice settings. Also needed is a modification of health-related education to ensure that those entering the disciplines develop instincts and capacities as applied scientists. (Am J Prev Med 2011;41(5):525-531) © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine

The FLU-FOBT Program is an intervention in which nurses provide home fecal occult blood tests (FOBTs) to eligible patients during annual influenza vaccination (FLU) campaigns. The effectiveness of the FLU-FOBT Program when implemented during primary care visits has not been extensively studied.The effectiveness of the FLU-FOBT Program was tested as adapted for use during primary care visits in community clinics serving multiethnic patients with low baseline colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates.Randomized clinical trial. During intervention weeks, nurses routinely initiated the offering of FOBT to eligible patients who were given FLU (FLU-FOBT group). During control weeks, nurses provided FOBT with FLU only when ordered by the primary care clinician during usual care (FLU-only group).The study was conducted in six community clinics in San Francisco. Participants were patients aged 50-75 years who received FLU during primary care visits during an 18-week intervention beginning on September 28, 2009.The primary outcome was the change in CRC screening rates in the FLU-FOBT group compared to the FLU-only group at the end of the study period, on March 30, 2010. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to determine predictors of becoming up-to-date with CRC screening.Data were analyzed in 2010. A total of 695 participants received FLU on FLU-FOBT dates, and 677 received FLU on FLU-only dates. The CRC screening rate increased from 32.5% to 45.5% (+13.0 percentage points) in the FLU-FOBT group, and from 31.3% to 35.6% (+4.3 percentage points) in the FLU-only group (p=0.018 for change difference). For those due for CRC screening, the OR for completing CRC screening by the end of the measurement period was 2.22 (95% CI=1.24, 3.95) for the FLU-FOBT group compared to the FLU-only group.FLU-FOBT Program participants were twice as likely to complete CRC screening as those receiving usual care. The FLU-FOBT Program is a practical strategy to increase CRC screening in community clinics. TRIAL REGISTRATION #: NCT01211379.

It probably could not have happened much sooner: the need for a systematically evidence-based guide to community preventive services was widely felt, but without the methodologic developments in community research, program evaluation, and data synthesis of recent years, it might have been a futile exercise in attempting to replicate the Cochrane-style reviews of randomized clinical trials. Without the explosion of community studies of health promotion and disease prevention programs in recent years, the pool of data would have been too shallow to produce much depth of understanding or breadth of generalizability. The timing of the exercise reported in the pages of this issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine could not have been much better from these developmental perspectives on the state of the art and science of community and population health. The field of public health has had time to mature beyond the communicable-disease paradigm. It has built substantially on its successes and its lessons for community and population health, but now it integrates with increasing utility the social and behavioral science theories and methods needed to encompass a wider and more entangled web of health determinants and interventions. So we approach the request to comment on this guide with the sense of adventure that comes with being on the shore of a new exploration, a new thrust on the frontiers of knowledge and health development.

Understanding the process by which research is translated into practice is limited. This study sought to examine how interventions change during implementation.Data were collected from July 2005 to September 2007. A real-time and cross-case comparison was conducted, examining ten interventions designed to improve health promotion in primary care practices in practice-based research networks. An iterative group process was used to analyze qualitative data (survey data, interviews, site visits, and project diary entries made by grantees approximately every 2 weeks) and to identify intervention adaptations reported during implementation.All interventions required changes as they were integrated into practice. Modifications differed by project and by practice, and were often unanticipated. Three broad categories of changes were identified and include modifications undertaken to accommodate practices' and patients' circumstances as well as personnel costs. In addition, research teams played a crucial role in fostering intervention uptake through their use of personal influence and by providing motivation, retraining, and instrumental assistance to practices. These efforts by the research teams, although rarely considered an essential component of the intervention, were an active ingredient in successful implementation and translation.Changes are common when interventions are implemented into practice settings. The translation of evidence into practice will be improved when research design and reporting standards are modified to help quality-improvement teams understand both these adaptations and the effort required to implement interventions in practice.

Practitioners and policymakers need credible evidence of effectiveness to justify allocating resources to complex, expensive health programs. Investigators, however, face challenges in designing sound effectiveness and translation research with relevance for "real-world" settings.Research experts and federal and foundation funders (n= approximately 120) prepared for and participated in a symposium, held May 4-5, 2004, to weigh the strengths, limitations, and trade-offs between alternate designs for studying the effectiveness and translation of complex, multilevel health interventions.Symposium attendees acknowledged that research phases (hypothesis generating, efficacy, effectiveness, translation) are iterative and cyclical, not linear, since research in advanced phases may reveal unanswered questions in earlier phases. Research questions thus always need to drive the choice of study design. When randomization and experimental control are feasible, participants noted that the randomized controlled trial with individual random assignment remains the gold standard for safeguarding internal validity. Attendees highlighted trade-offs of randomized controlled trial variants, quasi-experimental designs, and natural experiments for use when randomization or experimental control or both are impossible or inadequately address external validity. Participants discussed enhancements to all designs to increase confidence in causal inference while accommodating greater external validity. Since no single study can establish causality, participants encouraged replication of studies and triangulation using different study designs. Participants also recommended participatory research approaches for building population relevance, acceptability, and usefulness.Consideration of the study design choices, trade-offs, and enhancements discussed here can guide the design, funding, completion, and publication of appropriate policy- and practice-oriented effectiveness and translational research for complex, multilevel health interventions.

Population- and systems-based interventions need evaluation, but the randomized controlled trial (RCT) research design has significant limitations when applied to their complexity. After some years of being largely dismissed in the ranking of evidence in medicine, alternatives to the RCT have been debated recently in public health and related population and social service fields to identify the trade-offs in their use when randomization is impractical or unethical. This review summarizes recent debates and considers the pragmatic and economic issues associated with evaluating whole-population interventions while maintaining scientific validity and credibility.

There is a need for pragmatic and rigorous research designs to evaluate the effectiveness of population-based health interventions. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has limitations in its practicality, ethical appropriateness, and cost when evaluating population-based interventions. Like RCTs, the multiple baseline design can demonstrate that a change in behavior has occurred, the change is a result of the intervention, and the change is significant. Especially important practical advantages over the RCT are that this design requires fewer population groups and communities may act as their own controls. Advantages and methodologic limitations of the multiple baseline design are discussed, and where feasible, strategies to minimize the impact of its limitations are suggested. Recommendations for future research are included.

Background Practitioners and policymakers need credible evidence of effectiveness to justify allocating resources to complex, expensive health programs. Investigators, however, face challenges in designing sound effectiveness and translation research with relevance for "real-world" settings. Methods Research experts and federal and foundation funders ( n =∼120) prepared for and participated in a symposium, held May 4–5, 2004, to weigh the strengths, limitations, and trade-offs between alternate designs for studying the effectiveness and translation of complex, multilevel health interventions. Results Symposium attendees acknowledged that research phases (hypothesis generating, efficacy, effectiveness, translation) are iterative and cyclical, not linear, since research in advanced phases may reveal unanswered questions in earlier phases. Research questions thus always need to drive the choice of study design. When randomization and experimental control are feasible, participants noted that the randomized controlled trial with individual random assignment remains the gold standard for safeguarding internal validity. Attendees highlighted trade-offs of randomized controlled trial variants, quasi-experimental designs, and natural experiments for use when randomization or experimental control or both are impossible or inadequately address external validity. Participants discussed enhancements to all designs to increase confidence in causal inference while accommodating greater external validity. Since no single study can establish causality, participants encouraged replication of studies and triangulation using different study designs. Participants also recommended participatory research approaches for building population relevance, acceptability, and usefulness. Conclusions Consideration of the study design choices, trade-offs, and enhancements discussed here can guide the design, funding, completion, and publication of appropriate policy- and practice-oriented effectiveness and translational research for complex, multilevel health interventions.

This article reviews 21 published evaluations of workplace smoking cessation programs. Its purpose is to assess the quality of these evaluations and outline recommendations that may benefit such smoking cessation efforts. Issues that should be considered during the planning and evaluation of these smoking cessation programs include research design, behavior measurement and verification, employee recruitment strategies, nonsmoking behavior maintenance, and ethics.