Select the behavior you would like to target
Select the behavior you would like to target. You can select any behavior discussed in the course materials or the links above that would improve people’s health and/or environment. For example, in the project I led we wanted people to install rain gardens because it would help reduce stormwater pollution in the Puget Sound. Be very specific in selecting your behavior. The behavior should be small and have a measurable impact. Good examples might include wearing a mask, social distancing, vaccination, fixing oil leaks in your vehicle, scooping your dog poop, avoiding pesticides, not buying palm oil (or only buying sustainable palm oil), etc. A good discussion submission will explain why you selected that particular behavior.
Identify barriers and benefits to adopting that behavior. There are many ways to do this. You can interview or survey people who have and/or have not adopted the desired behavior as we did in the rain garden project with Snohomish Conservation District. Ask them what challenges they face and what would motivate them to change their behavior. You can also consult existing research on this topic. You can use the existing research conducted by previous students about rain gardens or you can find COVID-19 related research at COMPASS (Links to an external site.).
Develop strategies to change the targeted behavior. Would you like to use a meme, infographic, TikTok or YouTube video, etc.? What are you going to do with it once you have created it? For the rain garden project we used a combination of in-person contact going door-to-door, newspaper stories, and a video that are all linked above. Door-to-door is not a safe option this quarter because of the pandemic so think about ways you might use social media instead. You saw several examples of materials and strategies from Puget Sound Starts Here (Links to an external site.) and the COVID-19 campaigns at COMPASS (Links to an external site.).
Option A: You may create your own material for this step. If so, you will follow instructions below under the Option A bullet.
Option B: You may adopt or adapt existing material from one of the campaigns linked above or something similar. An adaptation might be a translation into another language or a modification that you think would be more effective. An adoption would be using the material that someone else created but coming up with a new distribution strategy. If you select this option you will need to cite your original source and conduct some additional evaluations of that item as outlines below under the Option B bullet.
Pilot the strategy. To pilot a strategy you would implement it on a small scale. To pilot our rain garden strategy we shared the video linked above to the Edmonds City Council and requested the funding we needed. Once we had the funding Conservation District staff went back to the homes of people who had told us during our surveys that they would be interested in having rain gardens installed to offer them the incentives they had requested. That is obviously a bigger strategy than you can implement in the last couple of weeks of class. More practical for you might be something like sharing a meme, infographic, or video on one or more social media platforms; using a hashtag to get a broader audience; persuading an influencer to share your created or adopted material; etc. This step is the same for both Option A and B.
Implement and evaluate the strategy on a broader scale. At this stage you take an idea that worked in the pilot and implement it in a new setting or broader context. In the case of the rain garden project we took the same strategy we used in Edmonds to the City of Lynnwood, obtained funding from them, followed up with residents identified in our door-to-door survey, and then began building more rain gardens with residents of Lynnwood in the Perrinville Creek watershed.
Option A: If you picked option A and created your own material then you do not need to complete this step. Instead, you only need to draw up a plan for how you might implement and evaluate your strategy on a larger scale. You will share that plan in the discussion folder.
Option B: If you picked option B then you are taking something created somewhere else and implementing it in a new setting. For this step you need to identify a means for evaluating the effectiveness of your implementation. You could do that in several ways: count the number of shares on social media, watch people targeted to see if they actually changed their behavior, ask your targeted audience if they changed their behavior, etc. You will share the results of this evaluation in the discussion folder.
Prepare a summary report of your experience to share in the discussion folder. Your report should list each of the five steps in bold above and describe in detail your process and experience for each step. It should embed the media (meme, infographic, video, etc.) that you created or adapted/adopted. It should identify whether you selected Option A or B and include the related information noted above.
Answer preview Select the behavior you would like to target
APA
1318 words