The ultimate aim of translational research in the prevention sciences is to establish evidence-based programs and services that facilitate the adoption or maintenance of positive health behaviors. Success is indicated by reductions in the incidence of mental and behavioral health disorders at the individual and population levels, and universal…

The increase of chronic disease in the United States has created a strong demand for health education specialists (HESs) who are trained to facilitate behavioral, environmental and policy changes through program implementation and evaluation. However, it is difficult for colleges and universities to prepare future health educators to be competent…

Dating violence is a serious public health problem. In recent years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other entities have made funding available to community based agencies for dating violence prevention. Practitioners who are tasked with developing dating violence prevention strategies should pay particular attention to…

Aboriginal Australians, including Aboriginal Health Workers (AHWs), smoke at rates double the non-Aboriginal population. This study utilized concept mapping methodology to identify and prioritize culturally relevant strategies to promote smoking cessation in AHWs. Stakeholder participants included AHWs, other health service employees and tobacco…

This article provides a theory-based, step-by-step approach to intervention development and illustrates its application in India to design an intervention to promote tobacco-use cessation among school personnel in Bihar. We employed a five-step approach to develop the intervention using the Social Contextual Model of Health Behavior Change (SCM)…

Project Advancing Cessation of Tobacco in Vulnerable Indian Tobacco Consuming Youth (ACTIVITY) is a community-based group randomized intervention trial focused on disadvantaged youth (aged 10-19 years) residing in 14 low-income communities (slums and resettlement colonies) in Delhi, India. This article discusses the findings of Focus Group…

Background: Community-based prevention marketing (CBPM) is a program planning framework that blends community-organizing principles with a social marketing mind-set to design, implement, and evaluate public health interventions. A community coalition used CBPM to create a physical activity promotion program for tweens (youth 9-13 years of age)…

Diabetes health disparities among Hispanic populations have been countered with federally funded health promotion and disease prevention programs. Dissemination has focused on program adaptation to local cultural contexts for greater acceptability and sustainability. Taking a broader approach and drawing on our experience in Mexican American…

The author, a federal manager who leads development and maintenance of evaluation for specific public health programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tells the story of developing an evaluation unit in the Office on Smoking and Health. Lessons about managing evaluation, including his practices and related principles, are…

Depression and anxiety constitute an enormous public health burden in Australia, and as such primary prevention is an important focus for school-based prevention efforts. The focus of the current literature review is school-based prevention programmes for depression and anxiety in Australia. Most prevention studies to date would be better…

Background: This paper discusses the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention's effort to develop a web-based service called Project CREATE that responds to a need for targeted health promotion materials expressed by directors of HIV/STD prevention services in predominately rural states. Purpose: Project CREATE allows users to select customized…

Although video is increasingly used in public health education, studies generally do not implement randomized trials of multiple video segments in clinical environments. Therefore, the specific configurations of educational videos that will have the greatest impact on outcome measures ranging from increased knowledge of important public health…

Suicide continues to be a serious public health problem. In response to this problem, a myriad of suicide prevention programs have been developed and employed across the United States. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of many of these programs is unknown because they have not been evaluated using rigorous methods. The Evidence-Based Practices…

Community participation in program decision-making and implementation is an ideal that community and academic stakeholders aspire to in participatory research. This ideal, however, can be difficult to achieve. We describe lessons learned about community participation from a quasi-experimental trial aimed at reducing the uptake of smoking among…

Focusing on emerging models of population-level risk reduction, the authors discuss the essential ingredients for successful suicide prevention programs: comprehensiveness, fidelity, and intensity. Issues of feasibility, access, and effectiveness are discussed. The authors argue for nesting suicide prevention programs within existing public health…