Applying Positive Deviance for Improving Compliance to Adolescent Anemia Control Program in Tribal Communities of India.

Background: Positive deviance (PD) is an asset-based social and behavior change communication strategy, utilizing successful outliers within a specific context. It has been applied to tackling major public health problems but not adolescent anemia.

Objective: The study, first of its kind, used PD to improve compliance to adolescent anemia control program in Jharkhand, India, where anemia prevalence in adolescent girls is 70%, and program compliance is low.

The power of positive deviance.

Identifying individuals with better outcome than their peers (positive deviance) and enabling communities to adopt the behaviours that explain the improved outcome are powerful methods of producing change

The positive deviance approach: challenges and opportunities for the future.

The positive deviance (PD) approach offers an alternative to needs-based approaches for development. The "traditional" application of the PD approach for childhood malnutrition involves studying children who grow well despite adversity, identifying uncommon, model practices among PD families, and designing an intervention to transfer these behaviors to the mothers of malnourished children. A common intervention for child malnutrition, the so-called "hearth," brings mothers together to practice new feeding and caring behaviors under the encouragement of a village volunteer.

Identification of model newborn care practices through a positive deviance inquiry to guide behavior-change interventions in Haripur, Pakistan.

A positive deviance (PD) inquiry identifies uncommon, model practices that a follow-on program can spread. PD has been used to rehabilitate malnourished children, but not for improving newborn health. Save the Children Federation/US (SC) conducted newborn PD cycles in communities (total population about 5,000 each) in two project areas in Haripur District, Pakistan among Afghan refugees and among local Pakistanis.