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This article discusses the state of the art concerning the meaning and value of model programmes in mental health promotion and mental disorder prevention. Model programmes are considered an important instrument for improving the quality, social impact and cost‐effectiveness of promotion and prevention. However, there is a lack of conceptual clarity and insight in the processes and mechanisms for successful use of model programmes in this field. This article offers a further clarification of the concept of model programmes and discusses its pros and cons and current views on the process of programme development and programme use. The discussion will be based particularly on recent experiences with model programmes in Europe. Until recently, prevention research was directed mainly at the design and testing of new model programmes. However, successful use of the ‘model programme strategy’ requires more attention to the pre‐conditions for effective dissemination, adoption and implementation of model programmes. Only when this multi‐phased process is taken into account and the required pre‐conditions and quality criteria are specified can one expect that model programmes will be more effective at a community level. The consequences of this view for prevention science and prevention research policies are discussed. To implement such a multi‐phased process successfully, not only are conceptual clarity and a scientific underpinning crucial, but also collaborative organisational structures are needed at national and international level if the range of complementary tasks is to be executed effectively and efficiently.

This paper aimed to review globally the empowerment programs for the prevention and control of smoking behavior among youths, to examine the role of empowerment in health promotion, to explore the stages of health promotion through community empowerment strategies including planning, implementation and evaluation. Finally, this paper will develop a model of youth empowerment to prevent and control smoking behavior that reflects theory and experience drawn from the literature.

This review synthesized articles on community empowerment and health promotion, youth empowerment programs for tobacco prevention and control globally from books and electronic databases from the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) library in the publication period 2000–2020. Relevant literature was selected and critically reviewed which reflected the role empowerment in health promotion, stage of community empowerment strategy as described by Laverack and youth empowerment concept in tobacco control as described by Holden.

Documents that specifically discuss empowerment programs for smoking prevention and control are still limited. The findings document that youth empowerment in tobacco control do not fully integrate the theory empowerment as described by Laverack and Holden. This paper provides information about the stages of youth empowerment, and a conceptual framework of youth empowerment for the prevention and control of smoking behavior. Youth empowerment is done through the direct involvement of youth in programs starting from program design, planning, implementation and evaluation. Indicators of the success of the empowerment process are reflected in the increase in the empowerment domain. Meanwhile, the output of empowerment can be seen from the individual- or group-level changes.

This paper proposes a model of youth empowerment for the prevention and control of smoking behavior among youths based on theory and experience in the field.

There is limited research examining community-based youth empowerment that addresses smoking prevention in the rural Indonesian context. This paper describes participatory action research (PAR) applied to develop a framework for empowering youth aged 17–25 years toward smoking prevention. This research conducted in the Indonesian rural community setting was divided into four stages: diagnosing, planning action, taking action and evaluating action.

PAR was chosen as the approach to developing a framework for youth empowerment in smoking prevention programs. In this study, the PAR cycle started with a prestep stage through interviews with village heads, community leaders, youth organization organizers, observations of target resources and observations of participation in youth activities as well as forming teamwork with target participants. The diagnosis stage consists of three activities, that is, focus group discussions with youth groups of male and female, youth assessment of empowerment domains through the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) with the Empowerment Assessment Rating Scale (EARS) and measuring individual and group involvement levels related to the smoking behavior prevention program by questionnaire. The EARS assessment results were presented in the action planning stage, followed by a discussion on youth empowerment plans and strategies. In the action stage, activities and programs are planned according to the planning discussion, that is: training in healthy life skills (outbound and training) and initiating youth health programs without smoking called “Remaja Berdaya Sehat Tanpa Rokok” (Empowered Youth Healthy Without Smoking) or the JayaStar Program. After these community participation activities, the evaluating action stage will assess the empowerment domain in the youth groups, conduct focus group discussions with parents, evaluate the impact of empowerment on individual and group changes with a questionnaire and facilitate self-reflection by the youth community called Madiska.

This protocol describes a doctoral research project on developing a youth empowerment framework in smoking prevention programs through PAR. The intended study will provide valuable information on the planning, implementation and evaluation of youth empowerment in the prevention of smoking behavior.

This research project is expected to contribute to the literature relating to PAR for rural settings and the use of empowerment strategies to prevent youth smoking behavior. The results can be replicated in the same settings, but the process of empowerment must still be adapted to the characteristics and local wisdom of the community.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of a school health promotion (SHP) advisor in the implementation of the six steps of the Dutch “Schoolbeat” approach, aimed at establishing health promotion policies and activities in secondary schools.

In total, 80 school board members, and 18 prevention coordinators of 18 schools in the Southern Limburg region in The Netherlands completed a written questionnaire on the implementation of the six steps of the Schoolbeat approach, and on their satisfaction with the practical assistance offered by the SHP advisor in implementing the steps, as well as the advisor's organizational competencies.

Only one school implemented the Schoolbeat approach completely, and as intended. Schools were generally satisfied with the practical assistance in the process of implementing the Schoolbeat steps and with the organizational competencies of the SHP advisor. Schools which had partly implemented the Schoolbeat steps were more satisfied with the SHP advisor's practical assistance than schools who had not done so at all.

This study showed that the SHP advisor could make a positive contribution to health promotion in schools. Since this role demands new skills, the competencies of health promotion professionals must be further developed.

Structural school health promotion programs and policies are becoming increasingly important in many countries, and not enough is known about the role of health promotion agencies in structuring school health promotion. This paper describes the positive impact of the SHP advisor.

To assess what volunteers‐ and ministers of faith‐based organizations (FBO) think about their own expertise in delivering a tobacco prevention initiative, the impact of such an initiative on youth, their potential for burnout in doing so, and their interest in other health initiatives.

A total of 149 volunteers and ministers attending a tobacco prevention workshop anonymously answered questions about its impact, and their own expertise, potential for burnout, and interest in other health initiatives.

Respondents strongly endorsed their personal expertise and the impact of tobacco prevention on youth. On burnout, ministers were significantly lower (an average answer of “don't know”) than teachers and others (an average answer of “disagree”); on other health initiatives, ministers were significantly more interested (an average answer of “strongly”) than teachers (an average answer of “moderately”). All were significantly more positive about offering other health initiatives if they had materials than if they had money.

Most respondents were African‐American, a higher percentage of ministers were men than among those in other positions, and all respondents came from a church that applied for, and received, a tobacco‐prevention grant – points that limit generalizability.

Those responsible for health initiatives would be well advised to direct their resources into developing appropriate materials rather than into paying people to deliver the programs.

Although FBOs provide fertile ground for health initiatives such as tobacco prevention, ministers may be more susceptible to burnout than volunteers.

Evidence on implementing effective adolescent mental health promotion and prevention interventions in the European context is underdeveloped. The purpose of this paper is to identify evidence-based mental health promotion and prevention interventions for adolescents that have been developed and/or implemented across the school, community and digital settings in Europe. This review also sought to identify the relevant implementation processes in relation to what works, for whom and under what circumstances.

A narrative synthesis of the evidence was conducted which included two stages: a systematic search of studies assessing adolescent mental health promotion and prevention interventions; and a selection of interventions with the most robust evidence base, using pre-defined criteria, that have been either developed and/or implemented in Europe.

A total of 16 interventions met the inclusion criteria. The majority of interventions were school-based programmes. The review findings support the delivery of interventions aimed at enhancing young people’s social and emotional learning (SEL) and preventing behavioural problems. Results indicate that the effective delivery of SEL interventions on a school-wide basis could provide an important platform on which other universal interventions such as anxiety and bullying prevention, and targeted depression prevention could be developed in a multi-tiered fashion. There were a limited number of studies providing robust evidence on the effectiveness of suicide prevention, digital and community-based interventions.

This review identifies a number of robust evidence-based promotion and prevention interventions for promoting adolescent mental health. While the interventions have been implemented in Europe, the majority has not been evaluated rigorously and few included detailed information on the quality of programme implementation. Evidence of the effective cross-cultural transferability of these interventions needs to be strengthened, including more systematic research on their implementation across diverse country contexts.

Erica S. Breslau, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a scientific program director in the Applied Cancer Screening Research Branch, in the Behavioral Research Program within the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Breslau’s research interests focus on women’s oncology issues in general, and specifically as they pertain to the social, behavioral, and psychological influences associated with breast, gynecological and colorectal cancer screening. Recent efforts include ensuring that research is able to inform and improve the quality of health services among women disproportionately affected with breast and cervical cancer through the dissemination of evidence-based intervention approaches. She has conducted population-based research in the area of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases in military populations, and has implemented large-scale health promotion approaches to improve the adoption of prevention practices. Dr. Breslau received her Ph.D. in Public Health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her Master’s in Public Health from Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.Vasilikie Demos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.Heather Hartley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. Dr. Hartley’s research interests include the sociology of health and medicine, the sociology of gender, the sociology of sexualities, and political sociology. Within these general specialty areas, her work focuses on the politics of women’s health, the pharmaceutical industry and the changing distribution of power within the health care system.Beth E. Jackson is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on the traditions of feminist epistemologies and critical social studies of science, her dissertation research puts questions of epistemic authority and the nature of evidence into the specific context of public health and epidemiology. Specifically, she explores the conditions, contexts, tools and processes through which public health knowledge claims are made, by focusing on a particular technology of “population health” i.e. the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) (a longitudinal, biennial survey of the mental and physical health of Canadians and their use of health care services). Her research also speaks to policy implications of “situated” data and evidence – in this case, the implications of how “women’s health” is defined, and the extent to which a gendered analysis of health is considered in the construction and analysis of the NPHS.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Nancy Luke is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University and a Research Fellow in the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. Her primary research interest is the impact of social organization on health and well-being, particularly among women and adolescents. She is presently co-Principal Investigator of two research projects, both of which include collection of household survey and ethnographic data. A project in Kenya studies the influence of marriage and economic transactions on sexual behavior in an area of high HIV/AIDS prevalence, and a project in India examines women’s empowerment in a context where norms sanction intimate partner violence. She has also collaborated with numerous non-governmental organizations on research projects pertaining to reproductive health and gender equity in developing countries. Dr. Luke has a Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Deborah Parra-Medina, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina with joint appointments in the Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior (HPEB) and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the UC San Diego, an M.P.H. in Health Promotion at San Diego State University and a B.A. in Social Science at UC Berkeley. She has extensive experience working with under-served communities, having worked in several chronic disease prevention and control efforts including cancer screening, tobacco control, weight loss and nutrition. Her research based on a participatory action model emphasizes the intersections of race, class and gender and the influence of socio-cultural environment on adaptive and maladaptive health behaviors. This perspective is exemplified in her current research. She is Principle Investigator of the SC American Legacy Empowerment (SCALE) Evaluation Project that is examining how to effectively engage youth as agents for social change within the context of tobacco prevention and control. Dr. Parra-Medina was recently awarded a pilot study grant from NCI, the broad goal of this project is to foster individual and organizational empowerment among the emerging Hispanic population in South Carolina in relation to cancer prevention and health promotion through the development of the South Carolina Hispanic Health Coalition: Partnership for Cancer Prevention (PCP).Colleen Reid recently completed her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in health promotion research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation was a feminist action research project with a group of women on low income. Together they examined the relationship between exclusion and health, the women’s varied discourses of poverty and health, and the promises and challenges of engaging in feminist action research. Dr. Reid has also been involved in community health research projects with organizations including the Vancouver YWCA, AIDS Vancouver, Literacy B.C., and the B.C. Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.Elianne Riska is von Willebrand-Fahlbeck Professor of Sociology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland since 1985. She has been Chairperson of the Department of Sociology 1985–1997 and Director of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Åbo Akademi University 1986–1993. Elianne Riska received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974. She was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University from 1974 to 1981. She was Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland 1997–2002. She is currently the President of the Research Committee of the Sociology of Health (RC15) of the International Sociological Association (2002–2006). Her most recent books are Gender, Work and Medicine (Sage, 1993), Gendered Moods (Routledge, 1995) and Medical Careers and Feminist Agendas: American, Scandinavian, and Russian Women Physicians (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001).Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Lynn Weber is a Director of the Women’s Studies Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. For the 2002–2003 year, she is Visiting Professor in the Consortium for Research on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality particularly as they are manifest in women’s health, in the process of upward social mobility and work, and in the creation of an inclusive classroom environment. In 2001 and 2002, she published two books, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework and Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: Case Studies (NY: McGraw-Hill) which are intended to move the field of intersectional scholarship ahead by serving as a guide to facilitate intersectional analyses and to foster more integrative thinking in the classroom. Dr. Weber is also co-author of The American Perception of Class.

Slovenia regained its independence in 1991, and in 2004 became a member of the European Union. Despite some progress in public health policy and practice, mental health has so far barely featured. Mental health literacy is poor, mental health services remain firmly rooted in the medical, institutional model, and public attitudes to mental ill health are predominantly negative. But Tanja Kamin here identifies some key opportunities that may lead to a greater emphasis on prevention of mental ill health and promotion of mental well‐being across the whole population.

Older adults’ sexual health is becoming an increasingly important component of healthy aging in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and rising infection rates among this age cohort. The increase in HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the older adult population ignites the need to understand the reasons why older adults are omitted from HIV/AIDS prevention education policy.

This chapter examines the social forces that influence HIV/AIDS policy at the state and community levels. Through qualitative methodology and analysis, including interviews with state policymakers and managers of AIDS service organizations in four Midwestern states (n=31), I look for trends and patterns as to whether or not older adults are considered as an “at-risk” group for HIV infection.

Findings reveal that HIV/AIDS policy may be impacted by enduring sexual scripts about older adults. To some extent both state policymakers and AIDS service organization personnel adhere to stereotypes about older adults’ sexuality and sexual activity, which is then implemented in their health promotion activities. The result is that gaps exist in HIV/AIDS prevention education for older adults, despite the fact that current trends show an increase in new HIV infections and AIDS diagnoses among people over the age of 50.

While this is an exploratory study of the available HIV/AIDS prevention education and health promotion activities for older adults, as well as the viewpoints of state policymakers and AIDS service organization personnel, the findings do indicate the need for additional research on the potentially dangerous sexual behaviors – lack of HIV testing, low condom usage, multiple partners – exhibited by older adults. Future research involving interviews with older adults, physicians, and medical personnel may add new perspectives to the current research.

As the baby boomers continue to age and challenge cultural stereotypes of sexual behaviors among older adults, research in the area of sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention education will remain an important component of healthy aging. This research begins what will ultimately be a necessary conversation.

Confusion over definitions, and particularly between everyday and scientific meanings, are a problem for all those working in the health prevention field. So are methodological shortcomings common in research in this area. Drawing on work done in the EC‐funded COST‐A6 project: evaluation of primary prevention in the field of illicit drugs, this paper sorts out some muddles and proposes some solutions.