Abstract
The Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year recognizes one paper published during the preceding year in Health Education & Behavior that is judged by the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, and Editorial Board of the journal as exemplifying the highest level of scholarship and making a singularly important contribution to the literature of the field. The award carries a $1,000 cash prize.
The paper is named for Lawrence W. Green (1940- ), whose long and distinguished career has included teaching posts on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley (where he received his MPH and DrPH degrees), Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, University of Texas at Houston, University of British Columbia, and the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Green also served as the first director of the U.S. Office of Health Information, Health Promotion, and Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health and later became a vice president and director of the National Health Promotion Program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. He later served as Distinguished Fellow/Visiting Scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he was director of the CDC–World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Global Tobacco Control and the Office of Science & Extramural Research of the CDC Public Health Practice Program Office. The author of a voluminous corpus of published scholarship, he is renowned for his PRECEDE–PROCEED model, which has been used throughout the world to guide health program intervention design, implementation, and evaluation. Dr. Green is a past president and distinguished fellow of the Society for Public Health Education and a member of the Institute of Medicine. He served in editorial capacities for both of Health Education &Behavior’s prior titles as editor of Health Education Monographs from 1973 to 1975 and as an Editorial Board member of Health Education Quarterly from 1982 to 1984. Since 1988, Dr. Green has remained an insightful and guiding member of the journal’s Advisory Board of Editors Emeriti.
The fund that supports the Paper of the Year Award was established in 1995 through a generous gift from SAGE Publications. The award was renamed the Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award by the Board of Trustees of the Society for Public Health Education in 2004 to honor Dr. Green’s enduring contributions to the scholarship of health education and to the Society.
2012 Nominees
The three finalist manuscripts nominated for the award (in alphabetical order by first author) were
Emmons, K. M., Weiner, B., Fernandez, M. E., & Tu, S.-P. (2012). Systems antecedents for dissemination and implementation: A review and analysis of measures. Health Education & Behavior, 39(1), 87-105.
Golden, S. D., & Earp, J. A. L. (2012). Social ecological approaches to individuals and their contexts: Twenty years of Health Education & Behavior health promotion interventions. Health Education & Behavior, 39(3), 364-372.
Kumar, S., Quinn, S. C., Kim, K. H., Musa, D., Hilyard, K. M., & Freimuth, V. S. (2012). The social ecological model as a framework for determinants of 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine uptake in the United States. Health Education & Behavior, 39(2), 229-243.
2012 Winner
The Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, and Editorial Board of Health Education & Behavior are delighted to announce that the winners of the Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award for 2012 are Shelley D. Golden and Jo Anne L. Earp for their article titled “Social ecological approaches to individuals and their contexts: Twenty years of Health Education & Behavior health promotion interventions” (Health Education & Behavior, June 2012, pp. 364-372).
Abstract
Social ecological models that describe the interactive characteristics of individuals and environments that underlie health outcomes have long been recommended to guide public health practice. The extent to which such recommendations have been applied in health promotion interventions, however, is unclear. The authors developed a coding system to identify the ecological levels that health promotion programs target and then applied this system to 157 intervention articles from the past 20 years of Health Education & Behavior. Overall, articles were more likely to describe interventions focused on individual and interpersonal characteristics, rather than institutional, community, or policy factors. Interventions that focused on certain topics (nutrition and physical activity) or occurred in particular settings (schools) more successfully adopted a social ecological approach. Health education theory, research, and training may need to be enhanced to better foster successful efforts to modify social and political environments to improve health.