+1 862 207 3288 Section 4: Social Ecological Analysis
Project instructions:
SECTION 4: SOCIAL ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
The social-ecological analysis is a literature review of the interventions that have been tried to address the risk factor that is the focus of your intervention. Note
that this analysis cannot be done until you have chosen a risk factor �in Section 3. The purpose of the analysis is to convince the reader that you have examined
different possible intervention points and that you have decided to focus on the one that seems most promising. The analysis typically reviews interventions at each
social-ecological level: personal, interpersonal (network), community, organizational, and policy. Of course all interventions are eventually directed toward helping
the person at risk, but sometimes the intervention point begins at higher social-ecological levels.
The analysis typically begins with key word searches containing the risk factor and words associated with each social ecological level. For example, interventions
focused at the personal (intra-individual) level generally try to change the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors of those at risk. Those at the interpersonal
level generally try to change the social network of friends, family and other support givers. At the organizational level, it is generally an organizational policy or
practice that is changed, for example, a workplace policy, with the aim being to help members of that organization. Many interventions identified as community
interventions in the literature, are really personal, interpersonal or organizational interventions offered through a community organization. To be a community
intervention the initial target of change must be some social structure that serves or influences the health of the greater community, such as a policy or resource
change in a local government, hospital, school board,
or corporation. For example, a health education class offered in the community by a hospital begins as an appeal to hospital administrators for a �community�
intervention. Once it begins, however, it is really a personal intervention offered by a hospital. Activities of other �communities��e.g. of �the gay community,� or the
�Hispanic community� � become community-level interventions if the object of change is either their own policies and practices or the policies and practices of some
local government or agency that serves members of a local community. Change at the policy level generally refers to attempts to change the funding priorities or
policies of state or federal government�though multinational corporations may also be targets of policy-level change as their influence is beyond the community level.
Media advocacy is actually intra-individual change, but as it�s ultimate object of change is policy (local community or higher)�it is often considered a community or
social policy intervention.
A thorough social ecological analysis for some risk factors, e.g. diet, exercise, sexual behavior for STDs� may easily run to hundreds of pages as many interventions
have been tried at many levels. Further, as risk factors often operate through or are affected by multiple social-ecological levels (personal, interpersonal, network,
community, organization or state and federal policy), the best public health interventions often focus on multiple causes at multiple social-ecological levels.
For practical reasons, however, the capstone, limits the search that must be done. Students should start their search by looking for relatively recent interventions
that have demonstrated success at each social-ecological level. (Generally one or two students search at each level using key words�as discussed above.) Students should
pay special attention to meta-analyses, review articles, and best practice summaries. These often make the task of identifying the best interventions at each level
easier. For this capstone there is no need to consider more than three successful interventions at each level. Indeed, for many risk factors groups will be lucky to
find three successful interventions at each level. Groups may also find that there are no published interventions or no successful interventions at some social-
ecological levels.
Once the group has categorized the studies by social ecological level and examined their relative success in changing the variable of interest, choose the social
ecological level that seems the most promising to leverage change.
The write up for the social-ecological analysis should not be more than a page and sometimes can be fit into a paragraph. It consists of two parts:
1. A description of the search process your group used: the search engine, the terms, the years reviewed, the results at each level, and the number of successful
studies found at each social-ecological level. For example, this is a reasonable approximation of what is required at the personal level:
A systematic literature review was performed in this study utilizing Texas A&M University Libraries e-Journals to ascertain published literature involving successful
intrapersonal HIV interventions for our target population of MSM. Key search terms input into the search engine included the following: HIV, intervention, behavior,
attitudes, motivation, MSM, homosexual. Upon reviewing the titles and abstracts of each study, the search results were refined to include only published peer-reviewed
literature after 2005, which condensed the number of search results to 104 total results. Of these, three successful interventions were chosen for comparison against
interventions at other levels: Jones and Goodall, 2011; Winston et al., 2012; Beaner et al., 2010).
2. A statement of which level you intend to focus and why. Here you explain your decision-process and why you decided to focus at a particular level.
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