The Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award

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 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.

2014 Nominees

The three finalist manuscripts nominated for the award (in alphabetical order by first author) were:

Jain, S., & Cohen, A. K. (2013). Fostering resilience among urban youth exposed to violence: A promising area for interdisciplinary research and practice. Health Education & Behavior, 40(6), 651-662.

Khodyakov, D., Stockdale, S., Jones, A., Mango, J., Jones, F., & Lizaola, E. (2013). On measuring community participation in research. Health Education & Behavior, 40(3), 346-354.

Shneyderman, Y., & Schwartz, S. J. (2013). Contextual and intrapersonal predictors of adolescent risky sexual behavior and outcomes. Health Education & Behavior, 40(4), 400-414.

2014 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 2014 are Dmitry Khodyakov, Susan Stockdale, Andrea Jones, Joseph Mango, Felica Jones, and Elizabeth Lizaola for their article “On measuring community participation in research” (Health Education & Behavior, June 2013, 40(3), 346-354).

Abstract

Active participation of community partners in research aspects of community–academic partnered projects is often assumed to have a positive impact on the outcomes of such projects. The value of community engagement in research, however, cannot be empirically determined without good measures of the level of community participation in research activities. Based on our recent evaluation of community–academic partnered projects centered around behavioral health issues, this article uses semistructured interview and survey data to outline two complementary approaches to measuring the level of community participation in research—a “three-model” approach that differentiates between the levels of community participation and a Community Engagement in Research Index (CERI) that offers a multidimensional view of community engagement in the research process. The primary goal of this article is to present and compare these approaches, discuss their strengths and limitations, summarize the lessons learned, and offer directions for future research. We find that whereas the three-model approach is a simple measure of the perception of community participation in research activities, CERI allows for a more nuanced understanding by capturing multiple aspects of such participation. Although additional research is needed to validate these measures, our study makes a significant contribution by illustrating the complexity of measuring community participation in research and the lack of reliability in simple scores offered by the three-model approach.