Health Educ Behav
December 2022
The overturning of and the increasing assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) rights in legislatures across the country have put our sexual and reproductive health in peril. They are likely also bellwethers of more to come. While a full reckoning of the repercussions from these attacks will not be known for a long time, the field of public health must act now with a strong and cohesive plan to mitigate the harms, fight these threats to our well-being, and lead the way forward.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: School-based sex education plays a vital role in the sexual health and well-being of young people. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of efforts beyond pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention. The authors conducted a systematic literature review of three decades of research on school-based programs to find evidence for the effectiveness of comprehensive sex education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructural change approaches-also known as policy and environmental changes-are becoming increasingly common in health promotion, yet our understanding of how to evaluate them is still limited. An exploratory scoping review of the literature was conducted to understand approaches and methods used to evaluate structural change interventions in health promotion and public health literature. Two analysts-along with health sciences librarian consultation-searched PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE for peer-reviewed U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEfforts to change policies and the environments in which people live, work, and play have gained increasing attention over the past several decades. Yet health promotion frameworks that illustrate the complex processes that produce health-enhancing structural changes are limited. Building on the experiences of health educators, community activists, and community-based researchers described in this supplement and elsewhere, as well as several political, social, and behavioral science theories, we propose a new framework to organize our thinking about producing policy, environmental, and other structural changes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere are important practical and ethical considerations for organizations in conducting their own, or commissioning external, evaluations and for both practitioners and evaluators, when assessing programs built on strongly held ideological or philosophical approaches. Assessing whether programs "work" has strong political, financial, and/or moral implications, particularly when expending public dollars, and may challenge objectivity about a particular program or approach. Using a case study of the evaluation of a school-based abstinence-until-marriage program, this article discusses the challenges, lessons learned, and ethical responsibilities regarding decisions about evaluation, specifically associated with ideologically driven programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerspect Sex Reprod Health
June 2006