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Health Education Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 173-184, 1991
© 1991 Oxford University Press

research-article

Using guiding-idea theories of the person to develop educational campaigns against drug abuse and other health-threatening behavior

William J.McGuire

Department of Psychology, Yale University New Haven, CT 06520, USA

Educational campaigns against health-threatening behaviors such as drug abuse may lose effectiveness because they tend to be narrow, atheoretical and to stress negative effects. As a corrective, it is proposed that health campaigns take into account the broad range of human needs and consider how the health-threatening behavior may be gratifying to each need. This allows taking into consideration not just the bad effects (which tend to be obvious) of such behaviors as drug abuse, but also the gratifications they provide to a variety of human needs, by their associated lifestyles as well as by their pharmaceutical effects. In this way anti-drug campaigns can be made to cope more relevantly with the attractions of such health-threatening behaviors. We sketch 16 theorized human needs, widely contrasting in their assumption of what instigates human action and what terminates it, each of which theories has proven provocative in guiding basic research. From each of the 16 theories some implications are drawn regarding the attractions of drug abuse and regarding the design of educational campaigns against such health-threatening behaviors.


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