Health promotion is increasingly cast as requiring
the identification of best practices through careful and
rigorous empirical evaluative research and applying
these as faithfully as possible in practice (deviating as
little as possible from what works according to the evidence).
Practitioners might be forgiven for feeling that
at times what is implied is both the possibility and the
desirability of one-size-fits-all interventions and that
the significance of place has become all but irrelevant.
Yet thoughtful and engaged practitioners everywhere
know this logic to be flawed. Interventions wither or
thrive based on complex interactions between key personalities,
circumstances, and coincidences. These
include, but are not limited to, timely funding opportunities,
changes in leadership, ideas whose time is right,
organizational constraints, available resources, and
local history of management–labor relations. In other
words, no two settings are alike. Ergo, at a minimum,
allowances must be made for the uniqueness of settings
across time and space.
A settings approach to health promotion has been
widely advocated as offering opportunities to situate practice in its social context, optimize interventions for
specific contextual contingencies, target crucial factors
in the organizational context influencing behavior, and
render settings themselves more health enhancing
(Baric, 1993; Frohlich & Poland, 2007; Poland, Green, &
Rootman, 2000; St. Leger, 1997; Whitelaw et al., 2001).
A settings approach to health promotion is an orientation
to practice that organizes it in relation to the environments
in which people live, work, and play. Inspired
in part by the work of Aaron Antonovsky on salutogenesis
(1996; Kickbusch, 1996; Poland, 2008), as well
as ecological approaches (Hancock, 1985; McLeroy,
Bibeau, Streckler, & Glanz, 1988; Richard, Potvin,
Kischuk, Prlic, & Green, 1996), a settings approach
views the physical, organizational, and social contexts
in which people are found as the objects of inquiry and
intervention, and not just the people contained in or
defined by that setting. Its emergence stems in part
from the recognition that arguably, the bulk of health
promotion practice has been oriented to such settings
(schools, workplaces, communities) and seeks to
increase the sophistication with which knowledge
about settings is mobilized in the planning, implementation,
and evaluation of health promotion interventions
(see also Wenzel, 1997). Widely promulgated by the
World Health Organization (WHO), health-promoting
networks and groups of researchers and practitioners
have formed around schools (Deschenes, Martin, &
Hill, 2003; Lister-Sharp, Chapman, Stewart-Brown, &
Sowden, 1999; St. Leger, 2001; Stewart-Brown, 2006;
WHO Expert Committee on Comprehensive School
Health Education and Promotion, 1997), universities
(Dooris, 2001), workplaces (Chu et al., 2000; Polanyi,
Frank, Shannon, Sullivan, & Lavis, 2000; WHO, 1999),
hospitals (Johnson & Baum, 2001; Pelikan & Lobnig,
1997; Wise & Nutbeam, 2007), cities and communities
(Ashton, 1992; Davies & Kelly, 1993; Duhl, 1986;
Goumans & Springett, 1997; Hancock, 1987, 1988;
Tsouros, 1995; WHO, 1992), prisons (Gatherer, Moller, &
Hayton, 2005), and islands (Galea, 2000).
Through a careful analysis of the intervention setting
(be it the home, community, school, or workplace),
practitioners can forestall the possibility that a crucial
oversight could wash their project up, stall progress, or
make them seem naive and out of touch with local
reality. This usually involves more than simply tweaking
a standard intervention protocol to make it fit in a
particular setting. To optimize the likelihood of success
(buy-in, organizational and personal change, etc.),
careful stock must be taken of the local place-specific
context of intervention. A detailed analysis of the setting
(who is there; how they think or operate; implicit
social norms; hierarchies of power; accountability
mechanisms; local moral, political, and organizational
culture; physical and psychosocial environment;
broader sociopolitical and economic context, etc.) can
help practitioners skillfully anticipate and navigate
potentially murky waters filled with hidden obstacles.
We wish to underscore that we do not advocate throwing
the baby out with the bath water; rather than being
dismissive of the intent behind, or thrust of, the movement
toward best practice or evidence-based practice,
we seek a modest but, in our view, essential reframing
that acknowledges the importance of learning from the
experiences of others (through many forms of both
rigorous and anecdotal evidence) and also the importance
of assessing and comparing the circumstances
and contexts in which outcomes were achieved elsewhere
with those pertaining to the setting in which an
intervention is being proposed (or what is called
assessing transferability in case study research). A settings
approach is envisaged not as a substitute for
evidence-based best practice but rather as an essential
component thereof (Poland, Lehoux, Holmes, &
Andrews, 2005).
A number of attempts have been made to systematize
evidence regarding the effectiveness of interventions
in different types of settings (e.g., school-based
health promotion, community development). A few
have recommended frameworks for conceptualizing
and organizing practice (e.g., Lee, Cheng, & St. Leger,
2005; Paton, Sengupta, & Hassan, 2005; Whitelaw et
al., 2001). However few, if any, attempts have been
made to systematically unpack those aspects of settings
that matter most to an understanding of the variability
of health promotion practice, as well as to the
experiences of intervention participants, in a way that
could directly impact policy, practice, and research.
The need to revisit our basic starting points in assessing
health promotion effectiveness has been underlined
in recent reviews of school health promotion research (Deschenes et al., 2003; Macdonald et al.,
1996; McCall, 2004; Rowling & Jeffreys, 2006) that
have called for new ways to understand the comprehensive
approaches and coordinated programs being
delivered in complex environments.
Furthermore, policy makers and researchers
(Scheirer, 2005; St. Leger, 2005; Stokols, 1996) are now
calling for new ecological forms of analysis that can
explain how multiple, coordinated programs can be
sustained after external funding or expert technical
support is reduced or withdrawn. Calls for capacity
building in health promotion (Best et al., 2003; McLeroy,
2006; O’Loughlin, Renauld, Richalrd, Gomez, & Paradis,
1998) are echoed by new approaches centered on continuous
improvement in education (Fullan, 2001;
Galbraith, 2004; Reilly, 1999; Sanders et al., 2004;
Senge, 1990; Zmuda, Kukils, & Kline, 2004).
The deficiencies of this controlled, linear thinking
approach is illustrated by one of the largest intervention
studies ever completed on coordinated approaches
to school health promotion. The Child and Adolescent
Trial for Cardiovascular Health (CATCH) was the largest
school-based field trial ever sponsored by the
National Institutes of Health in the United States. The
CATCH coordinated set of interventions included (a)
classroom instruction guided by a specific curriculum
supplement, (b) family component, (c) physical
education curriculum supplement, (d) a food service
component (Eat Smart), and (e) a smoke-free school
policy. Results from the main trial showed that children
from CATCH schools had lower consumption of
fat and higher levels of self-reported physical activity.
Retrospective analysis of the CATCH study (Heath &
Coleman, 2003) showed that institutionalization had
occurred after a few years. Perry et al. (1997) also
found strong correlations between
the positive health
outcomes achieved and effective implementation.
Participation, dose, fidelity, and compatibility in the
implementation of food service and physical activity
programs in 56 schools in four states were measured
and found to be correlated with successful program
effects. Hoelscher et al. (2004) reported on the maintenance
of the CATCH coordinated program. This
study compared 56 former CATCH and 40 former control
schools as well as 12 new schools defined as the
unexposed control group and found no significant
posttrial differences in school menus or in time
assigned to physical education. At follow-up, about
one third of the original CATCH and control schools
were still using the CATCH materials. Furthermore,
as with many other successful programs, the foundation
that had been supporting the CATCH program in
its home state of Texas has now decided to end that
funding.
There is something significant about the CATCH
interventions that we need to take into account if we
are to sustain such programs. The school setting is simply
unable to sustain high-profile programs like CATCH
without changing many of the practices within that
setting. And it is not as simple as telling teachers what
to teach and how to teach it. The framework presented
in this article provides a way of starting that process.
In this article, we lay out the core elements of a template
or framework that could be used by practitioners
to systematically analyze those features of settings that
can have the strongest impact on intervention design
and delivery. We present this in the form of a nested
series of questions to guide analysis. We have used one
of the settings most often studied in the research, the
school, to illustrate aspects of the framework. Furthermore,
we offer advice on additional factors that should
be taken into account when operationalizing a settings
approach in the field.
The impetus for evolving the framework and writing
this article arose from the authors’ experiences in developing
and implementing a graduate-level course titled
Settings and Strategies for Health Promotion.1 We wanted
to create a framework for guiding analysis and, eventually,
intervention design, implementation, and eval