Social Psychology and Health Education

This chapter addresses the contribution of social psychology to the field of health education. After a short introduction to health education, the role of social psychology is addressed. This role is referred to as problem-driven applied social psychology. Subsequently, the chapter describes general and specific theories that can be applied to the analysis of psychosocial determinants of health related behaviours, the development of theory-based and data-based intervention programs, and theory-based and data-based implementation planning. For each of these phases the chapter presents a research protocol illustrated by studies in the areas of smoking prevention and AIDS prevention.