Health Education Research Advance Access first published online on November 30, 2006
This version published online on March 21, 2007
Health Education Research, doi:10.1093/her/cyl146
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The Behavior-Image Model: a paradigm for integrating prevention and health promotion in brief interventions
Addictive and Health Behaviors Research Institute, Department of Health Education and Behavior, University of Florida, 6852 Belfort Oaks Place, Jacksonville, Florida 32216-6241, USA
Correspondence to: Correspondence to: C. Werch. E-mail: cwerch{at}hhp.ufl.edu
This paper describes the Behavior-Image Model (BIM), an emerging and innovative paradigm for planning brief interventions for adolescents that fuse the prevention of harmful behaviors with the promotion of healthy habits. We discuss the components of the BIM as a new paradigm for creating multiple behavior health interventions, as well as the empirical and conceptual underpinnings of the model, and present Project Sport as an illustration of how the BIM may be applied to construct a brief multi-behavior intervention. The BIM posits that selected salient images of others and ourselves may be used to cast gain- and loss-framed messages coupling and motivating health-promoting and health-risk behaviors within single interventions. This content in turn activates prototypes and future self-images through the processes of social and self-comparison, leading to improvements in risk and protective factors and subsequent change in targeted health-promoting and health-risk behaviors. Recommendations are offered for conducting future research integrating health-risk and health-promoting behaviors in both brief and non-brief interventions for adolescents and adults.
This is a new version as there was an error in Figure 1 in the first version
Received on August 23, 2005; accepted on October 5, 2006