Tom Davis Washington, DC Feb 26, 2009 18:16 pm

Food for the Hungry has developed an easy to use tool for determining barriers to behaviors that is now being used by many private voluntary agencies working in the developing world. While the tool has been mainly used to find barriers and determinants of water/sanitation and health behaviors, it can be used to find barriers of other behaviors, as well. The City of Baltimore used it, for example, to find out why people were not using trash cans, a major source of their rat problem.

We have a website where you can download the manual for free: http://barrieranalysis.fhi.net. I have attached it, as well. The website also includes an online tutorial. We have an Excel sheet that makes data analysis easy (looking for associations, automatically calculating Odds Ratios and p-values) -- email me if you need that file.

Note that the manual recommends two ways of conducting the study, one using focus groups and the other using individual questionnaires. We just recommend using the individual interviews at this point. I will post some of the examples of the use of the tool. The tool uses the questions that are mentioned in Fostering Sustainable Behavior Change, but adds some other based on the Health Belief Model and other determinants we have found to be important.

Sincerely,


Tom Davis
Dir. of Health Programs
Food for the Hungry
United States