Kirk Dearden
Associate Professor, BYU – Public Health
kirk_dearden@byu.edu

“Does Education Improve Health? Lessons Learned from Behavior Change Interventions”

Presentation Abstract:
Education is often regarded as critical to ensuring that individuals who have access to additional resources—including loans—use those assets to improving the well-being of families. For a variety of reasons, efforts to educate may not be sufficient to bring about the behavior change (a pre-condition for improved health). In this presentation, we examine various definitions of education as well as the multiple factors that ultimately influence individual- and community adoption of healthy behaviors. We propose that in most cases, information sharing is insufficient to bring about behavior change and that effective population-level behavior change requires formative research to more fully understand why people behave the way they do and to identify behavior change strategies that are most likely to succeed in improving health. We also argue that institutions offering microcredit need to strengthen monitoring information systems and conduct more rigorous evaluations of impact, not only within the field of microenterprise, but cross-sectorally as well. We use case studies from Asia, Africa and Latin America to illustrate these points.

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Biography:
Dr. Kirk Dearden is associate professor at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he teaches international health as part of BYU’s MPH program on global health promotion. Prior to joining BYU, Dr. Dearden worked as senior research and evaluation specialist at the Academy for Educational Development (conducting applied research on infant feeding in Southern countries), Johns Hopkins University (carrying out research on reproductive health), Save the Children Federation/US (assessing the impact of multi-sectoral program on health), and the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (evaluating the impact of gender and development programs on maternal and child health). Dr. Dearden received his BA from Boston University in Third World Development and his MPH and DrPH degrees in international health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He also carried out post-doctoral research with Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Dearden has consulted on applied research with the Academy for Educational Development, Save the Children Federation/US, the BASICS Project, the US Agency for International Development, including projects to assess the impact of microenterprise services, and the World Health Organization.