These are the kinds of questions that community awareness strategies are designed to address. Utilizing diverse approaches, community awareness strategies are intended to bring attention to the impact of high risk behaviors on individuals and the community at large -- and in doing so, set the stage for behavior change. Increasingly, community awareness strategies have incorporated an understanding of social marketing -- acknowledging that building awareness in order to change behavior requires analysis of your target audiences, their current beliefs and attitudes, and the values held which might influence and impact behavior.

Community awareness strategies take time -- and are best integrated into a comprehensive range of prevention and intervention strategies that reinforce their messages. One has only to look at the evolution of the acceptability of smoking within the United States over the past thirty years -- and the continuing challenges to reduce the number of new smokers (even amidst a changed cultural climate) -- to gain an appreciation of the difficulty of impacting broad-based behavior change. Nonetheless, effective community awareness activities can help bolster other prevention strategies, and build a local climate more conducive to their messages.

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Community Awareness Strategies

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