EFFECT AND STAGE MODELS IN COMMUNITY INTERVENTION PROGRAMS - AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODEL FOR MANAGEMENT OF INTERVENTION PROGRAM PREPARATION (MMIPP)

Recent years have seen the development of a number of diagrammatic 'mo dels' bearing on community intervention programmes. There halle been t wo basic types, one involving actual or hypothetical causal relationsh ips (effect, or how-it-works models) and the other, sequences of activ ities or events (stage, or how-to-do-it models). A selection of such m odels, with their roots in different theories of social change health education and health promotion, are reviewed in the light of this dist inction. Both types of model are important. Existing stage models for health promotion programmes imply an ordered or cyclical set of activi ties, in which preparation is followed by implementation,maintenance, evaluation and revision. In the second part of the paper a new and mor e detailed type of stage model is presented for the preparatory phase. In practice, this phase involves a series of parallel but interdepend ent activity streams. These add up to a complex process that needs to be carefully planned and managed. In such circumstances it is importan t to be able to convey to the various people and organisations involve d how their different contributions mesh together The new model is des igned to help with this. It has been developed in the light of experie nce of planning community-based disease prevention programmes in Stock holm and elsewhere, with the objective of making the lessons learned a vailable for others in a compact and accessible form.