Importance of Planning to the Effectiveness of the Program “Safe Driving Education Programs at School: Lessons from New Zealand”
It is important to plan effective public health programs because it helps health care practitioners to understand critical issues in the improvement of individual health outcomes (Fertman & Allensworth, 2017). It was important to plan the Safe Driving Education Program (as cited in Harré & Field, 1998) because the process helped to evaluate its success. This happened through the introduction of the control group population, which helped the public health workers understand whether there were notable behavioral differences between the intervention group and the control group (Harré & Field, 1998).
The planning process also helped to structure the public health program in an interactive way that would make it more receptive to the target audience (Fertman & Allensworth, 2017). For example, the program included discussion groups and self-assessment reports, as critical elements of its interactive structure, thereby making it more receptive to all the participants because their input was factored into the process (Harré & Field, 1998). This high level of appeal to the program’s audience stems from the efficiency and attention given to the planning process.
Lastly, the planning process was integral to the program’s design phase, which involved developing relevant content and framing the findings to appeal to the social context to which the findings would be applied (Fertman & Allensworth, 2017). These two tenets of the program (content and social context analysis) were critical in increasing the effectiveness of the program because the planning phase helped the program designers to predict how the health outcomes would fit in the New Zealand social setting. This step links to the evaluation phase because it also helped the researchers to understand how the contents generated from the program would apply to the social context under review.
How Improvements in Planning Might have Changed the Outcomes of the Program “A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Students Against Driving Drunk”
Improvements in planning may have changed the outcomes of the second program, which aimed to reduce the incidence of injuries and death caused by drunk driving. Effective planning could have eliminated some of the research design problems, which created limitations in drawing reliable conclusions from the study (Klitzner, Gruenewald, Bamberger, & Rossiter, 1994). An effective planning process would have allowed the researchers to develop a better S.A.D.D model that would not only yield reliable results but also generate findings that would have a strong social impact (Edelstein, 2017). This view stems from findings identified in the second program, which showed that there would be a minimal probability of the program creating a positive social change, even if the S.A.D.D model was implemented correctly (Klitzner et al., 1994).
The weaknesses highlighted in this study showed that the researchers failed to plan correctly, particularly in areas concerning how the research design would work and how the findings of the program would help to promote social change. More importantly, the findings of the study showed that through ineffective planning, the researchers were unable to understand how the unique exigencies of school-based interventions, in the selected sample institutions, would affect their result outcomes.
Lastly, through effective planning, the researchers would have eliminated the problems that arose from attrition, thereby minimizing the design issues that prevented them from coming up with conclusive findings in the first place (Edelstein, 2017). Comprehensively, effective planning would have solved most of the research design issues that prevented the researchers from generating valid results that would have been instrumental in reducing the incidence of drunk driving, if the entire S.A.D.D model was implemented correctly in the institutions sampled.
References
Edelstein, S. (2017). Nutrition in public health. London, UK: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Fertman, C. I., & Allensworth, D. D. (Eds.). (2017). Health promotion programs: From theory to practice (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Harré, N., & Field, J. (1998). Safe driving education programs at school: Lessons from New Zealand. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 22(4), 447–450.
Klitzner M., Gruenewald, P. J., Bamberger, E., & Rossiter, C. (1994). A quasi-experimental evaluation of students against driving drunk. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 20(1), 57–74.