Transtheorical Model Of Intervention

When an intervention aims to promote knowledge, provide tools and impact risk behaviors of individuals, it is necessary to generate new behavioral repertoires that lead to positive outcomes and healthy lifestyles. Behaviors are actions, expressions, words, emotions and, thoughts. It is everything that a living organism does, which is observable, measurable and operational. Besides, a behavior is defined from its background, which stimulates or triggers the behavior. Likewise, its consequences determine whether a behavior occurred again or not. For example, when the consequences are positive, the behavior is reinforced and repeats. Contrary, when they are negative, the behavior is punished and decrease. In this way, a behavior is a complex element

People are creatures of habit, who usually perform repeated behaviors of the things they like or things they find easy to do. Healthy behaviors such as physical activity can be viewed as undesirable because requires effort, repetition, energy expenditure and commitment (Alex text).

This situation creates the need for designing intervention programs considering the behavioral change theories, as they help to learn how behaviors are built, model and reinforced. Such understanding can generate innovative and effective strategies for the establishment of new and healthy behaviors in individuals, despite the barriers. Thus, for this intervention will consider the Transtheorical model, as its behavioral change theory.

Transtheorical model:

This is a model that explains the behavior change in health considering the possibility to plan and implement interventions bearing in mind specific characteristics of the population involved. Moreover, the transtheorical model affirms that behavior change is a process, which requires going gradually through different stages. It also recognizes that most at-risk populations, do not have strategies to take action, they have different levels of motivation and interest for adopting the new behaviors. Thus, to design successful intervention programs must be considered the different stages

Process of change: These are ten processes of change that represent behaviors, thoughts, and emotions of people performing the new behavior. Consciousness raising (knowledge of new facts), counterconditioning (change of healthy thoughts for unhealthy ones), dramatic relief (experience positive and negative emotions of exercise), environmental re-evaluation (realize the effect you have in others), helping relationships (social support), reinforcement management (being reward for doing exercise), self-liberation (commitment to change and exercise often), self-reevaluation (create a new self-image, realize exercise is important for the person's identity), social-liberation (realize that social trends support exercise) and, stimulus check (use the environment to be physically active). (Alex