Kenneth Mcleroy

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Texas A&M University School of Public Health

Comprehensive smoke-free policy is a strategy to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD) at a population-level; however, evaluating their long-term outcomes is difficult. This study used an agent-based model to estimate long-term impacts of a comprehensive smoke-free policy, as it was implemented in two communities, Arlington and Mesquite, Texas. The...

Objectives: To use network analysis in order to evaluate the effectiveness of interorganizational networks in implementing policy, systems, and environmental interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention throughout the United States. Methods: Evaluators conducted an interorganizational network (ION) survey to examine information sharing an...

Introduction A need for innovative public health programs is evident as the field adapts to address changes in health priorities and target populations. The Innovative Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (iTP3) was created to support and enable innovation in teenage pregnancy prevention, developing programs to reach the most at risk youth. Methods A...

Over the past 20 years, teenage birth rates in the United States have declined substantially but continue to persist among certain populations. During this time period, a series of rigorously tested teen pregnancy prevention (TPP) programs were developed, and a number of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) emerged. In April 2017, researchers review...

BACKGROUND: The CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) Statement was developed to help biomedical researchers report randomised controlled trials (RCTs) transparently. We have developed an extension to the CONSORT 2010 Statement for social and psychological interventions (CONSORT-SPI 2018) to help behavioural and social scientists rep...

BACKGROUND: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are used to evaluate social and psychological interventions and inform policy decisions about them. Accurate, complete, and transparent reports of social and psychological intervention RCTs are essential for understanding their design, conduct, results, and the implications of the findings. However, t...

Introduction: In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded the American Heart Association to implement policy, systems, and environment-focused strategies targeting access to healthy food and beverages, physical activity, and smoke-free environments. Method: To understand factors affecting implementation and variations in succe...

The American Heart Association conducted policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) focused interventions to increase healthy vending in 8 communities. PSE interventions were assessed using the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey Vending Assessment to see changes in the food environment. Baseline and follow-up assessments were conducted with 3 sett...

Community health assessment and community health improvement planning are continuous, systematic processes for assessing and addressing health needs in a community. Since there are different models to guide assessment and planning, as well as a variety of organizations and agencies that carry out these activities, there may be confusion in choosing...

Purpose: In 2014, the American Heart Association (AHA) started a new initiative called the Accelerating National Community Health Outcomes through Reinforcing (ANCHOR) Partnerships Program. The ANCHOR Program works to improve cardiovascular health using population-based strategies targeting policy, systems and environmental (PSE) level changes. Fro...

The Physical Activity and Community Engagement Project utilized a comparative case study to understand how a theoretical framework called community health development (CHD) influences community capacity. Three rural communities (cases) developed interventions using a CHD framework. Researchers collected qualitative evidence measuring capacity and t...

While there is widespread support for implementing evidence-based interventions to improve adolescent health, health programs either become out dated and the participants are not engaged or new programs are needed for under-served populations. Innovation receives attention in health care and health systems. However, in health education the focus on...

Background: Scientists have established that social networks influence adolescents' substance use behavior, an influence that varies by gender. However, the role of gender in this mechanism of influence remains poorly understood. Particularly, the role an adolescent's gender, alongside the gender composition of his/her network, plays in facilitati...

This article is based on a presentation that was made at the 2014 annual meeting of the editorial board of Health Education & Behavior. The article addresses critical issues related to standards of scientific reporting in journals, including concerns about external and internal validity and reporting bias. It reviews current reporting guidelines, e...

Introduction: Exergames are an innovative type of physical activity that engages participants through interactive gameplay. One exergame growing in popularity is geocaching. Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunt that uses GPS-enabled technology to locate hidden caches. Caches are hidden all over the world, and their coordinates are listed in an...

Context: Nonprofit hospitals are exempt from paying taxes. To maintain this status, they must provide benefit to the community they serve. In an attempt to improve accountability to these communities and the federal government, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 includes a provision that requires all nonprofit hospitals to cond...

Derived from various health care policies and initiatives, the concept of population health has been newly adopted by health care and medicine. In particular, it has been suggested that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provision that requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) and implement strat...

Background: Despite previous research indicating an adolescents' alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use is dependent upon their sex and the sex composition of their social network, few social network studies consider sex differences and network sex composition as a determinant of adolescents' ATOD use behavior. Methods: This systematic lite...

The authors present the results of a media documentary, Weight of the Nation, disseminated in rural communities in the Brazos Valley region of east central Texas. Researchers relied on a community-based participatory research strategy to assure community participation in the implementation and evaluation of the media documentary in rural communitie...

Efforts to change policies and the environments in which people live, work, and play have gained increasing attention over the past several decades. Yet health promotion frameworks that illustrate the complex processes that produce health-enhancing structural changes are limited. Building on the experiences of health educators, community activists,...

Objectives: We sought a better understanding of how nonprofit hospitals are fulfilling the community health needs assessment (CHNA) provision of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to conduct CHNAs and develop CHNA and implementation strategies reports. Methods: Through an Internet search of an estimated 179 nonprofit hospitals i...

Background: The State of Texas ranks last in the United States for access to health care. A recent health assessment, conducted in a nine-county region of east-central Texas, revealed that 23.8 percent of residents reported that they had trouble getting the health care services they needed; in fact in one of the rural counties, 20.2 percent of resi...

Work in public health increasingly requires coordination of multiple organizations within a community to achieve positive change. Successful collaboration requires the connection of diverse organizations to tackle complex and pressing problems at multiple levels of the social ecological model (McLeroy et al., 1988). Diversity though can create chal...

Comprised of various dimensions, community capacity is recognized as a set of characteristics that enable communities to address local health issues. The Center for Community Health Development (CCHD) at the Texas A&M School of Public Health, a Prevention Research Center, has partnered with rural communities in the Brazos Valley, Texas for the past...

Diabetes self-care by patients has been shown to assist in the reduction of disease severity and associated medical costs. We compared the effectiveness of two different diabetes self-care interventions on glycemic control in a racially/ethnically diverse population. We also explored whether reductions in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) will be more ma...

Compared with their urban counterparts, rural populations face substantial disparities in terms of health care and health outcomes, particularly with regard to access to health services. To address ongoing inequities, community perspectives are increasingly important in identifying health issues and developing local solutions that are effective and...

Widespread recognition of the need to improve the science of published research, as well as the moral and ethical reasons for adequately reporting study results, has spurred recent interest in strengthening journal research reporting through the use of reporting guidelines. Reporting guidelines also provide information for readers to judge study qu...

Community interventions are complex social processes that need to move beyond single interventions and outcomes at individual levels of short-term change. A scientific paradigm is emerging that supports collaborative, multilevel, culturally situated community interventions aimed at creating sustainable community-level impact. This paradigm is roote...

We want to thank our colleagues Michael Dubois and David Buchanan for raising important issues in the ethics and economics of prevention that provide the foundation for this editorial. In Dubois’s article, he highlights some of the philosophical arguments surrounding the inclusion of prevention policies in private and publicly-funded health insuran...

Despite the quickening momentum of genomic discovery, the communication, behavioral, and social sciences research needed for translating this discovery into public health applications has lagged behind. The National Human Genome Research Institute held a 2-day workshop in October 2008 convening an interdisciplinary group of scientists to recommend...

Clean-air and smoke-free ordinances have been shown to reduce the prevalence of smoking among the overall population, but their effects on the smoking prevalence among older adults deserves further attention. We examined changes in self-reported cigarette smoking and in attitudes toward smoking after the implementation of such ordinances in Fort Co...

This article does not have an abstract.

The Initiative on the Study and Implementation of Systems (ISIS), a four-year project sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), represents an innovative approach to understanding and ultimately managing the interplay of the various social, biological and behavioral elements that lead to tobacco use and cessation. Through ISIS, NCI has suppo...

How are research results translated to public health practice? What is the responsibility of researchers, funding agencies, and journals in facilitating the use of research results in public health programs or policies? We address selected aspects of these questions and announce a new emphasis of the Journal on external validity for appropriate man...

Background: The Brazos Valley Health Partnership (BVHP), a regional partnership serving seven counties in Central Texas, was established to improve access to care and health status in the Brazos Valley. Capitalizing on community health development constructs, the BVHP has evolved as a partnership to address disparities in access to a variety of hea...

The role of parental communication and instruction concerning sexual behaviour were studied in a community-based sample of 1083 youth aged 13-17 (mean age of 15 years; 51% girls, 49% White). The Youth Asset Survey was administered along with items measuring demographics and youth risk behaviours. After controlling for demographic factors, multivari...

The current state of health insurance coverage in the United States is deteriorating. Historically, efforts to address access at the federal level have met with insurmountable opposition. This article describes a model utilizing the Partnership Approach to Community Health Improvement to engage communities in developing creative ways of addressing...

This study explores youth and parent agreement about conversations on specific topics related to sexual risk behavior and youth-parent relationship. The study's objective was to determine if the amount of agreement was associated with youth sexual behavior. Data were collected using a computer-assisted data entry system from one parent and one yout...

Over the last two decades, concern has been expressed about the readiness of the public health workforce to adequately address the scientific, technological, social, political and economic challenges facing the field. A 1988 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) served as a catalyst for the re-examination of the public health workforce. The I...

A multiple case study design was used to evaluate coalitions for community health improvement and promotion in Oklahoma. Data collection in three communities took place in two-day site visits; interviews were conducted with 42 persons. A coalition development model was used to analyze structure, activities and outcomes: mobilization, development of...

Recent research suggests that a youth development framework emphasizing youth assets may be a promising intervention strategy for preventing adolescent risk behaviors. Understanding how neighborhood and community resources relate to youth assets may aid in identifying environmental strategies to complement individually oriented asset-building inter...

The title of this editorial honors Richard Smith, the outgoing editor of BMJ, who recently published a spirited and honorable editorial of his own, “Editorial Independence at the BMJ.”1 That short piece helped crystallize for us a common underlying principle as we wrangled over issues of guest editorship, outside funding for Journal publications, a...

Historically, public health has been viewed through a variety of lenses. One lens focuses on the contrast between the science and the practice of public health.1 Another focuses on individual versus social responsibility for health.2 A third lens visualizes the contrast between an emphasis on disease categories and an emphasis on functional communi...

Purpose To investigate the possible positive cumulative effects that youth assets may have on youth sexual behaviors. Design Cross-sectional data were collected from a randomly selected population by in-home, in-person interviews. Mantel-Haenszel chi-square test and logistic regression were conducted to determine the potential cumulative effects t...

We examined the association between adolescent alcohol and drug use and 9 youth assets in a low-income, inner-city population. An in-person survey of 1350 adolescents and parents assessed youth assets and risk behaviors. We analyzed data with chi(2) tests and logistic regression analyses. When we controlled for appropriate variables, there were sig...

The authors explored adolescent physical fighting and weapon carrying, using in-home interviews with 1,098 middle/high school students and their parents. Logistic regression analyses examined the relationship between youth assets and the risk behaviors while controlling for demographic information. Both demographic factors and assets were associate...

To examine the relationship among individual youth assets and adolescent sexual risk behaviors. Cross-sectional, in-home interview data from randomly selected inner-city neighborhood teenagers (N = 1253) and their parents (N = 1253) were analyzed. Demographic information (e.g., age, parental income, family structure) was statistically controlled fo...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate a model for collaboration between program providers and program evaluators. The article describes how university-based evaluators, a state health department, and local program providers collaborated to evaluate 12 projects implementing commercially developed teenage pregnancy prevention (TPP) programs i...

The last few years have been a time of enormous activity for the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the Journal. APHA has endured political and fiscal adversity, adopted a global public health mission, worked through staff departures and subsequent hires, and embraced a change in leadership with the appointment of Georges C. Benjamin, MD...

A National Public Health Education Leadership Institute was developed through collaboration among national health education professional organizations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a school of public health. The institute provides health educators in leadership positions throughout the country access to a 15-month integrated...

Evidence is accumulating to suggest that positive youth development may be an effective approach to preventing teen pregnancy. Studies show that selected protective factors or “youth assets” are associated with lower levels of adolescent sexual risk behavior. This paper describes the development of “Healthy, empowered and responsible teens of Oklah...

The article Reconsidering Community-Based Health Promotion: Promise, Performance, and Potential by Merzel and D’Afflitti1 in this issue of the Journal makes a valuable contribution to the literature on community approaches to health promotion. The breadth of studies covered in this review article, combined with the prominence the Journal is giving...

To use youth and parent demographic factors, youth assets (strengths), and community constructs to develop age-group-specific profiles for youth who abstain from sexual activity. Data were collected using in-person interviews of youth (N = 1253) residing in randomly selected, inner-city neighborhood households. Data were analyzed to create classifi...

To describe the construction of a survey that was developed to measure youth assets. The paper details the ten youth developmental assets measures within the survey, including the psychometric properties of those measures derived from factor analysis and reliability testing. Three studies were conducted, including a study of 1,350 randomly selected...

Purpose To examine the effects of 10 youth developmental assets on adolescent tobacco use. Design Survey of a randomly selected sample using in-home interviewing methodology. Setting Inner-city areas of two midsized Midwestern cities. Subjects The researchers studied 1,350 teen-parent pairs. Measures Demographic information, adolescent self-rep...

Purpose To investigate relationships among youth risk behaviors and demographic factors using an adolescent age group approach. Design Cross-sectional data from a randomly selected population. Risk behaviors were compared within specific demographic factors and by adolescent age groups. Setting Racially diverse, inner-city neighborhoods in two mi...

Community health promotion relies heavily on coalitions to address a multitude of public health issues. In spite of their widespread use, there have been very few studies of coalitions at various stages of coalition development. The purpose of this study was to identify factors that facilitated or impeded coalition effectiveness in the implementati...

Although community capacity is a central concern of community development experts, the concept requires clarification. Because of the potential importance of community capacity to health promotion, the Division of Chronic Disease Control and Community Intervention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), convened a symposium in December 1...

The purpose of this study was to identify factors that contribute to the effectiveness of community health promotion coalitions. Member survey data from 10 coalitions formed as part of North Carolina Project ASSIST were analyzed at the coalition level to identify factors related to member participation, member satisfaction, quality of the action pl...

Adolescent pregnancy is a significant public health problem. The adolescent pregnancy rate in the United States is higher than in many other industrialized nations. Reviews of programs designed to prevent teen pregnancy conclude that few effective interventions exist. This article describes a promising approach to teen pregnancy prevention currentl...

Studies of adults report inconsistent findings as to whether males or females are more likely to use violent behaviors toward their partner. Although partner violence frequently begins during adolescence, few dating violence studies involve adolescents and even fewer report findings by gender. This study examines gender differences in adolescent da...

Interviews were carried out with 19 providers of sexual health care to young people. Providers were asked to reflect on many relevant issues including the service they provided and its strengths and weaknesses. They were also asked to comment on teenage sexuality. There were marked differences of view between those who provide advice via a general...

Researchers in health education have rarely convened to outline research priorities in the field. This article discusses the results of a meeting to develop a research agenda aimed at creating capacity to promote and maintain health. Salient research findings related to individual and community health are summarized and priority issues for future r...

On Day 2 of the joint CDC/SOPHE conference on Creating Capacity: Establishing a Research Agenda for Health Education, the participants were asked to identify research needs or special issues in working with children and adolescents, the elderly, women, men, and underserved groups. This article presents the priority research areas across subgroups i...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of implementation of school health education curricula, to identify factors which enhanced or impeded implementation, and to examine the link between the adoption and implementation phases of the diffusion process. Design The study used an experimental design; 22 school districts were r...

The practice norms of community physicians and dentists in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania for counseling about smoking cessation were surveyed. In addition, 1,373 residents in the valley were interviewed by telephone about the smoking counseling behaviors of their dentists and physicians. These activities were conducted as part of the planning f...

This quasi-experimental study assessed impact of factors associated with classroom implementation of health curricula by North Carolina teachers. School representatives selected and implemented one of three tobacco prevention curricula--Project SMART, Growing Healthy, or the Teenage Health Teaching Modules--in either sixth or seventh grades. Prior...