ABSTRACT
As touched on briefly above, the Stages of Change Model (also known as the Transtheoretical Model) asserts that health behavior change involves progress through six stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and relapse. This model, rooted in explaining health behavior change, offers a potentially useful framework for understanding that people are not monolithically motivated toward adopting or maintaining any type of behavior, whether it relates to health, the environment, or any other domain. Using this model, behavior change is conceptualized as an ongoing process in which people progress through a series of stages from not considering making a behavioral change to actually adopting a new behavior and maintaining it (Kreuter, Farrell, Olevitch, & Brennan, 2000). A number of factors such as awareness, knowledge, attitudes, and social norms all influence who is in what stage and what factors are likely to move people along this trajectory. The section that follows delineates each of those stages, all the while making linkages to social marketing within the context of environmental behavior change. Again, the assumption made in this chapter is that specific
audience segments reside within each stage. All references to the Stages of Change model are cited from Prochaska and Velicier (1997) unless otherwise noted.
