To fill an existing gap in research and practice on intimate partner violence (IPV) in immigrant communities, the authors developed an IPV prevention program, called the Shanti Project, in an Asian Indian community in the Midwest. Building on the notion of shanti (harmony/peace), a cherished value and strength of the community, we created a communications campaign that combined social marketing and community-based participatory approaches. Recognizing the interactive influences of multiple levels of social ecology, campaign activities were designed to bring about changes at the individual, relationship/family, organization, and community levels. This article presents the development of this theoretically, empirically, and community-based IPV prevention program.

Community-based prevention marketing (CBPM) is a community-driven framework for program planning, which applies social marketing concepts and techniques to the development of health behavior interventions. Whereas community members who comprise an action committee or coalition set the goals and make programmatic decisions, social marketing provides the planning framework to guide program design, implementation, and evaluation. CBPM has guided successful initiatives to promote physical activity in both youth and adults, to increase safety eyewear use in agricultural settings, and to delay alcohol and tobacco initiation among youth. However, the emergence of evidence-based policy has fostered renewed interest in “upstream” approaches to health behavior change that, in the United States, have included community partnerships as an important tool for policy development. Unfortunately, these community partnerships have had variable success because of the lack of a systematic framework for identifying, selecting, tailoring, and promoting evidence-based policies. We describe the adaptation and application of CBPM to improve community capacity for identifying and promoting evidence-based policies. The resulting framework, CBPM for Policy Development, is comprised of the following eight steps: (1) build a strong foundation for success; (2) review evidence-based policy options; (3) select a policy to promote; (4) identify priority audiences among beneficiaries, stakeholders, and policy makers; (5) conduct formative research with priority audiences; (6) develop a marketing plan for promoting the policy; (7) develop a plan for monitoring implementation and evaluating impact; and (8) advocate for policy change. We provide a description of each step and an examination of the experiences and lessons learned in applying it to youth obesity prevention.

In the United States, community coalitions are an important part of the public health milieu, and thus, subject to many of the same external pressures as other organizations—including changes in required strategic orientation. Many funding agencies have shifted their funding agenda from program development to policy change. Thus, the Florida Prevention Research Center created the Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) for Policy Development framework to teach community coalitions how to apply social marketing to policy change. The research reported here was designed to explicate the framework’s theory of change. We describe and demonstrate a hybrid evaluation approach: utilization-focused developmental evaluation. The research question was “What are the linkages and connections among CBPM inputs, activities, immediate outcomes, intermediate outcomes, and ultimate impacts?” We implemented a case study design, with the case being a normative community coalition. The study adhered to a well-developed series of steps for system dynamics modeling. Community coalition leaders may expect CBPM to provide immediate gains in coalition performance. Results from causal diagramming show how gains in performance are delayed and follow an initial decline in performance. We discuss the practical implications for CBPM’s developers—for example, importance of managing coalition expectations—and other social marketers—for example, expansion of the evaluation toolkit.

BackgroundBreast and cervical cancers have emerged as major global health challenges and disproportionately lead to excess morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) when compared to high-income countries. The objective of this paper was to highlight key findings, recommendations, and gaps in research and practice identified through a scoping study of recent reviews in breast and cervical cancer in LMICs.MethodsWe conducted a scoping study based on the six-stage framework of Arskey and O’Malley. We searched PubMed, Cochrane Reviews, and CINAHL with the following inclusion criteria: 1) published between 2005-February 2015, 2) focused on breast or cervical cancer 3) focused on LMIC, 4) review article, and 5) published in English.ResultsThrough our systematic search, 63 out of the 94 identified cervical cancer reviews met our selection criteria and 36 of the 54 in breast cancer. Cervical cancer reviews were more likely to focus upon prevention and screening, while breast cancer reviews were more likely to focus upon treatment and survivorship. Few of the breast cancer reviews referenced research and data from LMICs themselves; cervical cancer reviews were more likely to do so. Most reviews did not include elements of the PRISMA checklist.ConclusionOverall, a limited evidence base supports breast and cervical cancer control in LMICs. Further breast and cervical cancer prevention and control studies are necessary in LMICs.