Evaluation of PD Projects
Nutrition
Using PD Analysis to Evaluate Community-based Nutrition Programs
This paper applies positive deviance analysis to the Dular program in Bihar, India, a community-based nutrition program that seeks to improve the impact of India’s Integrated Child Development Services on young children. Although positive deviance is usually thought of as a formative research tool to enhance program design, the positive deviance approach also can be used in the assessment of survey data to identify promising intervention paths, as indicated in this paper. Such use of positive deviance analysis in the Dular program is facilitating ongoing efforts to improve the program qualitatively as it expands and to reallocate resources where they are likely to have the most significant impact.
Learning From the Community to Improve Maternal-Child Health and Nutrition
This article presents the results of a literature review designed to gather information on the role of the Positive Deviance/Hearth methodology in social and behavior change. Examples of how the methodology has been applied beyond infant and child malnutrition to address other health areas, such as improving pregnancy outcomes, are explored. An analysis of Positive Deviance programming being carried out by Project Concern International in Guatemala and Indonesia is conducted. The issues related to cultural context and the challenges for monitoring and evaluation of program outcomes are presented.
Public Health
Applying the PD Concept to Public Health Data
This paper presents a protocol for extending the concept of Positive Deviance to analysis of existing public health data. The protocol includes assessing whether PD fits the situation, identifying positive deviants, and identifying behaviors associated with positive deviants’ healthy outcomes. Analyzing existing datasets from a PD perspective may aid public health nurses in efforts to reduce health disparities.
Smoking Cessation Outcomes in New South Wales Prison Settings
This letter gives a brief summary of results from the implementation of an intervention designed to decrease smoking prevalence in New South Wales (NSW) prisoners. It also presents stages of the positive deviance approach and their relevance to reducing smoking prevalence in NSW prison settings.
Nurse-Patient Communication in a Family Planning Context
This study seeks to gain a better understanding of nurse-patient communication in order to improve the quality of counseling. They explored the personal experiences of nurses and patients who communicate especially effectively during family planning consultations, in order to identify factors in the clinic and in the community that enable nurses and patients to communicate effectively with one another.
Healthcare
Pathways to Prevention: Mapping PD/MRSA Prevention Networks
A number of hospitals involved in PD projects are experimenting to discover whether mapping the MRSA elimination networks can help them measure, understand and enhance the shift in relationships that makes PD so successful. By studying the patterns of units with the lowest transmission rates, staff can help all of the units develop networks that support the elimination of MRSA.
Other
Agricultural Development in Kenya
Positive internal innovation has long been a central element of African agricultural development, even if modern efforts to stimulate technical, institutional, and policy innovations in African agriculture have tended to look outwards. This paper examines the role of positive deviance in Kenyan agriculture over the last 75 years to cast doubt on the alleged authoritative sources of policy advice and mandates from the outside. Positive deviance and appreciative inquiry are suggested as organizing frameworks for identifying and amplifying the generation and uptake of internal African innovations.
Research Spotlight
Positive Deviance: A New Strategy for Improving Hand Hygiene Compliance
This paper, published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidimiology (January 2010) reviews a 9 month controlled trial comparing the effect of positive deviance on compliance with hand hygiene. The study found flaws in the study design but concluded that, "the positive deviance approach for improving hand hygiene compliance deserved further evaluation," and that, "positive deviance resulted in a significant improvement in hand hygiene, which was associated with a decrease in the incidence of hospital acquired infections."