Description of Health Condition and Selected Article
Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women in the United States. Research has shown that prevention is the best way to manage this disease (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). The assigned article highlights the main problem preventing many women from going for breast cancer screening services. It addressed the selected health issue through a pilot test study that aimed to encourage more women to go for mammography. The study identified women aged between 45 years and 79 years as respondents for the study. Of the 127 eligible participants, 35% of them agreed to counseling and breast cancer screening (Costanza et al., 2009). Most of them were three years overdue for screening, while some of them had received a mammogram within the past year. Comprehensively, the study showed that it was possible to convince women to go for a mammogram, even if they were long overdue. Using the same metric of possibility, the researchers also established the probability of advancing their stage of adoption. However, they highlighted the importance of formally evaluating the clinical trial with a controlled trial (Costanza et al., 2009).
How to Apply the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) to the Health Issue
The PAPM model recognizes seven distinct stages that influence people’s decisions regarding a health issue. The distinct stages are “unaware of the issue,” “aware of the issue, but not personally engaged,” “engaged and deciding what to do,” “planning to act, but not yet having acted,” “having decided not to act,” “acting,” and “maintenance” (Glanz, Rimer, & Viswanath, 2008). The different stages of this model apply to the health issue in the sense that they explain the beliefs, experiences, and behaviors that would inhibit, or encourage, women to go for breast cancer screening. By understanding these factors, it is easier for health workers to understand factors that would make women transition from one stage of awareness to another. Ferrer et al. (2011) support this fact by arguing that change occurs when people pass through significant psychosocial changes that would often lead to the long-term adoption of a health behavior.
Flowchart of how the PAPM Model Applies to the Health Issue
Strengths and Limitations of the Precaution Adoption Model as it Applies to the Health Issue
Strengths
The ability of the PAPM model to segment people’s health behaviors into different stages provides a good framework for developing targeted health information. According to Weinstein, Sandman, and Blalock (2008), people often have a short attention span and public health workers have a fixed amount of time for making presentations. These limitations make it difficult to impart targeted health knowledge to people. Furthermore, people often do not adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors because of varied reasons. The PAPM model helps to identify these inhibitors and provide an opportunity for public health workers to develop targeted health information. Weinstein et al. (2008) support this view by saying that people are likely to respond well to treatments that match their stages of development. Moreover, it is difficult to lose their attention by giving them a mismatched intervention. The PAPM model is also capable of tackling the difficulty of convincing women to go for mammography. Weinstein et al. (2008) call this problem the difficulty of behavioral change. Since it is difficult to create behavior change in this health issue, the PAPM model allows health workers to have separate messages for every stage of intervention.
Limitations
Data misinterpretation is a common limitation of using the PAPM model in the selected health issue. For example, the theory shows that different psychosocial factors, such as perceived susceptibility and self-efficacy, cause the differences between each stage of the model. Usually, the common understanding is that such variables would determine behavior change, but the truth is that the change in the stages involved may have produced the variables mentioned, and not the other way around (Weinstein et al., 2008). This is a significant limitation in the use of the PAPM theory. Another limitation associated with its use is the difficulty of identifying which stage a person may be in the seven stages of the model (Weinstein et al., 2008). This limitation arises because breast cancer screening is a complex health issue.
Additional Insight
Many theories that strive to predict behavior change often focus on creating a transition between a state of inaction to a state of action (Glanz, Rimer, & Viswanath, 2015). The PAPM model differs from these theories because it is holistic. In other words, it presents the transition from inaction to action as only one stage among a series of other stages. In this regard, it does not conflict with other theories; instead, it provides a more detailed view of human behavior (Weinstein et al., 2008). For example, the health belief model mostly focuses health behavior engagement by investigating or highlighting factors that would encourage people to engage in these behaviors or prevent them from doing so. Comparatively, the PAPM model is elaborate because it focuses on issues, such as awareness of health programs, or health issues that would precede action (Glanz, Rimer, & Viswanath, 2015). In this regard, the PAPM model is more elaborate than other types of theories that predict health behaviors.
Conclusion, Suggestion and Probing Question
Comprehensively, in this paper, we find that the PAPM model strives to explain what happens before people take action. It also explains how people translate these decisions into action. This theory thrives on the premise that there are qualitative differences between people. Therefore, it questions how researchers could use one analytical premise to question everybody’s health behaviors. Based on these insights, I suggest that researchers should investigate how consistent the barriers between the different stages of development occur. Nonetheless, since proponents of the PAPM model say it is useful in explaining the barriers that predict movements across different stages (Glanz et al., 2015), is it correct to assume that the model is simply trying to weigh the costs and benefits of human action
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2012). Chronic disease prevention and health promotion. Web.
Costanza, M., Luckmann, R., White, M., Rosal, M., LaPelle, N., & Cranos, C. (2009). Moving mammogram-reluctant women to screening: A pilot study. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 37(3), 343–349.
Ferrer, R., Hall, K., Portnoy, D., Ling, B., Han, P., & Klein, W. (2011). Relationships among health perceptions vary depending on stage of readiness for colorectal cancer screening. Health Psychology, 30(5), 525–535.
Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K., & Viswanath, K. (Eds.). (2008). The precaution adoption process model. In Health behavior and health education: Theory, research, and practice (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K., & Viswanath, K. (Eds.). (2015). Health behavior: Theory, research, and practice (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Weinstein, N. D., Sandman, P. M. & Blalock, S. J. (2008). The Precaution Adoption Process Model. Web.