Say you are working to change something big across a large population; for example, tobacco use, or teen pregnancy rates, or recycling habits. Traditionally, programs have been designed with the idea that knowledge and attitudes lead to behavior change (see earlier post). For example, teach people about the dangers of tobacco use, help them develop new beliefs about the health risks of tobacco use, and you will see rates fall.
What’s puzzled scientists and the social sector alike, however, is why so few people actually change their behavior. Why do people persist in smoking even when they know it is unhealthy? Emerging research (some decades old, but increasingly getting its due) is pointing to the importance of our environment in our behavior. The environment around us has a myriad number of triggers that factor into how we act; we are barely conscious of many of them. A great story on NPR highlighted how important environmental factors were in reducing drug use after the Vietnam war.
This presents a challenge for evaluators. We often rely on data from people – surveys, interviews, or other records – to help us understand knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. While there are numerous subtleties and pitfalls we can encounter in our studies, measuring factors in the environment that might influence each of these can be even more tricky.
We’ve seen the impact of environmental factors in several studies we’ve done, particularly those that have lasted for several years. For example, in our 6-year study of Minnesota’s programs that serve people with disabilities and people who are elderly in their homes, a specific method of delivering services, called CDCS, was just being promoted for one subset of the population at the beginning of the study and was only used in pockets here and there. As the funding streams, benefits, and opportunities became more clear and visible, the service was promoted more and more families used it. The result was an increase from 1.2% to 6% of people with disabilities accessing this type of service.
Program managers and evaluators should take note. Some programs are specifically tackling the environment, such as the Minnesota’s State Health Improvement Initiative, which aims to change the ways we eat and exercise. Others encourage their participants to build their own healthier environment, as does the Network for Better Futures. Evaluators must take environmental changes into account when measuring the success of a program in order to truly understand its impact.
