Health Behaviour Change Through Public Health Intervention

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Comparison of “Truth” and ALERT Interventions
(a) Description
The “Truth” intervention was a mass media public health initiative that aimed at revealing truths untold by the cigarette manufacturers and was specifically initiated by the American Legacy Foundation. In its most basic form it can be described as an antismoking campaign that mostly targeted young people and thoroughly deglamorized the smoking behavior. Through the television campaigns, the intervention highlighted several things that concerned effects of smoking behavior not only to the young people but also to the adults because it was using the mass media. Firstly, it openly laid out both the short and long term effects of smoking habit and tinted smoking as undesirable social behavior. It unearthed all the misperceptions of tobacco smoking among the teens. The intervention had adverts on the media that not only contained messages urging teens and other smokers to stop smoking but also had inclusion of graphic images that portrayed the death and disease facts resulting from tobacco use. In addition, the campaign exposed all the manipulations that had been established by marketing departments of cigarette manufacturing firms. The intervention worked on the believe that deglamorizing and exposing the real truth about the effects a smoking lifestyle would actually reduce smoking and hence help very much in prolonging lives of many America. Fortunately studies have confirmed this theory to be true.
On the other, there is the ALERT intervention. This public health initiative is quite similar to the truth initiative as it regards to the purpose of why it was established. Basically the intervention involved developing a curriculum for sixth and seventh graders. The curric...

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...eptibility of the risk now graduates to another whereby some signs in the life of the smoker like coughing are enough convincing factors that it is the high time he quits smoking or risk dying of lung cancer. This is even accentuated by environmental and demographic factors like age. If he is very aged, then decision to quit smoking is not very far. When a smoker perceived the benefits attached to him by simply just quitting, the probability to quit is always high because he stands to losing nothing. It is those benefits that even overshadow the barriers that might deter the behavior change. The central thing here is that the model helps the smoker to perceive things as they are and pushes him to choose why he wants to belong by presenting the susceptibility and severity of the matter. The worthiness of the change is based on the benefits accrued over the obstacles.

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