Resources for teaching and learning are posted at tinyurl.com/Glanz4e and www.med.upenn.edu/hbhe4.
This fourth edition of the classic book, Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice provides a comprehensive, highly accessible, and in-depth analysis of health behavior theories that are most relevant to health education. This essential resource includes the most current information on theory, research, and practice at individual, interpersonal, and community and group levels. This edition includes substantial new content on current and emerging theories of health communication, e-health, culturally diverse communities, health promotion, the impact of stress, the importance of networks and community, social marketing, and evaluation.
Just GREAT currently I'm working on a population- behavioral model reserach on menstural habits and attitudes in non-urben cities and this book was suugeted by my dear Proffessor. really helped me to apply the health belief models in my research. It's a little bit adavnced level but you can handle it if you are familiar enough to your reseracg question and research field 5/5
This is one of the best books that one could read for an introduction to health behavior and health education. The contents, as the title suggests, provide you an overview of all the work and development done for health education and behavior theory, research, and practice.
Before reading this book, I only had a very amateur grasp of the theories and frameworks used in this field (thanks to work). It is with my supervisor's infectious thirst for knowledge that I decided to undertake more formal training (on my own) to support my work. Now I feel entirely familiar and comfortable with the major theories and frameworks, to the point where it's easy for me to apply them in my professional job. The language is direct and accessible; even with beginner-level knowledge, it is easy to grasp. One interesting thing to note is that the book also offers a current discourse on health communication and e-health, which in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, is more pertinent than ever. To quote my supervisor, "this is our go-to Bible."
The book also helped me to recognize and refine my own interests for my post-grad and research avenues in social and behavior change with the intersection of health. It served as a starting resource that helped me to look up more authors, papers, books, and commentaries in the field of health behavior and health education. Including the original works of theorists covered in this such as Bandura, Ajzen, Fishbein, Kaspryzk and Montano and mentions of works on norms (compelling me to look up Lapinski and Rimal).
A quote from this book... " Thus the readers of this book should 'pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact' (Churchill, 1898). As the ocean meets the shore, so we hope you will find that theory, research, and practice in health promotion and education stretch out to converge in a single landscape"
ridiculous attempts at making a book about theory sound like 18th century poetry aside, it's a good overview of various models and theories of health behavior and programs.
As far as Health Behavior goes, I'm sure this book was great. There were some chapters that the authors automatically seemed to assume that you had read the books that they were referencing as they explained the different theories. That wasn't the case in my opinion and some of the theories were confusing because of it. I'm glad that there's a newer version of the textbook and would actually be interested in comparing the differences between the two, but yeah this book wasn't too bad as far as text books are concerned.
Some of the chapters were were terribly written, others were well read. All in all, this book is a mixed bag, but there is a lot of useful information.
Well, it was for school so... it was no pleasure read. But I thought it did a great job of explaining the different theories, constructs etc. with realistic and helpful examples.
This book offers a good variety of topics in health behavior research written at a level appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
I used this for an undergraduate Community and Behavioral health class this summer. It is very well laid out and easy to follow. The format lead to a clear understanding of how to choose, implement and evaluate community health interventions.