Week 5 raises the analysis above the individual to the layers that make a behavior easy or hard: relationships, organizations, community and policy. The tools are the ecological model as an organizing frame, community organizing and coalition approaches for how change gets built with people rather than delivered to them, and diffusion of innovations for how a practice spreads through a social system. The written work has to put an activity at more than one level. Your section may print this as MPH 505 or MPH505; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
What MPH-505 Week 5 asks for
A school district wants more children drinking water instead of sweetened beverages during the day. A message campaign at the individual level asks children and families to choose water. The same objective addressed ecologically asks a different set of questions: are the fountains working, is there a bottle-filling station anywhere near the cafeteria, does the district contract permit sweetened drinks in vending, do teachers allow water bottles at desks, and does the parent association have a position. Each of those is a lever at a different level, and each has a different owner. Writing the plan so that at least two levels carry an activity is the point of this stage.
The ecological model is a frame rather than a predictive theory, which is a distinction worth making explicitly in your paper. It tells you where to look and it does not tell you what will happen; the mechanisms at each level still come from the theories you have already met and from the community-level models this week introduces. Used well, it prevents the standard failure of a plan that asks people to behave differently inside conditions that make the behavior expensive, inconvenient or unavailable.
Community organizing and coalition models supply the second half. Their central claim is procedural: change that lasts is built with the affected community holding real decision power over problem definition, priorities and design, rather than being consulted after those decisions are made. Concepts to have straight include the distinction between community capacity and community participation, the difference between a coalition of organizations and a group of residents, and the honest ladder from informing through consulting to shared decision making. Papers that say community engagement without saying which rung they are standing on are describing an intention.
Diffusion adds a different question again: not how one person decides but how a practice spreads across a population over time. The attributes that predict adoption are well established, and they are useful precisely because they are actionable: relative advantage over the current practice, compatibility with existing values and routines, simplicity, trialability, and observability of results by others. Reframing your intervention so it scores better on those five attributes is a design move that graders recognize immediately.
The MPH-505 Week 5 method, step by step
Six moves for building a multi-level plan that is not just a longer list.
-
Audit the levels before you add activities
For each level, write one sentence on what currently makes the behavior harder. Levels with nothing to say get no activity, which is a better paper than one activity per level for symmetry.
-
Name the owner of each lever
A principal, a district contracting officer, a facilities manager, an association chair. Levels do not act; people with authority do, and an activity with no named owner cannot be implemented.
-
Place yourself on the participation ladder honestly
Informing, consulting, involving or sharing decisions. Say which one your plan actually offers and what would be required to move up a rung, since claiming partnership you are not providing is visible to any reader who has done this work.
-
Score your intervention on the diffusion attributes
Relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability, observability. Where it scores badly, redesign rather than promote harder. Making a practice easier to try is usually cheaper than persuading people to try a hard one.
-
Identify the real opinion leaders
Adoption spreads through people the audience already trusts, who are frequently not the people with formal titles. Say how you would identify them, and name the method rather than asserting who they are.
-
Show the levels reinforcing each other
Write one sentence connecting each pair of activities: the policy change makes the message credible, the message makes the new option visible, the setting change makes the trial possible. Unconnected levels are a list, not an ecological plan.
Lay out the multi-level plan and budget the words
Our frame for an ecological and community-level paper, sized for roughly 1,300 to 1,600 words. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's scoring guide outranks it wherever the two disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| Level audit | What makes the behavior hard at each level, with evidence, and which levels are genuinely binding here. | 250 to 300 |
| Activities and owners | The two or three activities you will run, the level each sits at, and the named role that controls it. | 250 to 300 |
| Participation stance | The rung you are on, who is at the table, what they decide, and what remains outside their control. | 200 to 250 |
| Diffusion assessment | Your intervention scored against the five attributes, with the redesign each weak score produced. | 250 to 300 |
| Social system and leaders | The network your practice has to spread through, and your method for identifying who carries influence in it. | 180 to 230 |
| How the levels interlock | The reinforcing links between activities, stated one pair at a time. | 170 to 210 |
Evidence craft for multi-level work
Cite evaluations of multi-component programmes, not single-component trials. The evidence you need is about whether combined approaches outperform their parts, and that literature exists. Reporting the design of a multi-component evaluation, including how components were sequenced, is more informative than another single-message trial.
Attribute policy claims to the instrument. Where you propose a policy or contractual change, cite the actual mechanism: a district policy, a procurement clause, a state statute. Vague references to policy change are unimplementable and score as such.
Use process evidence from community-engaged work. Published accounts of coalitions and community-based participatory projects report what took time, what broke down and what sustained, and those details are the most transferable part of the literature for a plan that has to be run by real people.
Be careful with adoption curves. The familiar categories describing early and late adopters were derived in specific diffusion studies and are frequently over-applied. Use them as a way of thinking about sequencing rather than as fixed proportions you can assume for your population.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- A level checklist with no analysis. One activity per level, added for completeness, is the ecological version of theory as decoration.
- Community engagement with no rung. If the community's role is to attend a session you designed, say so honestly rather than calling it partnership.
- Policy proposed with no instrument or owner. Advocate for policy change is not an activity anyone could schedule.
- Diffusion named but never applied. The attributes are a redesign tool. Listing them without changing anything about your intervention wastes them.
- Levels that never touch. An ecological plan is defined by interaction between levels, so unconnected activities lose the very thing the model contributes.
Before you submit
- Each level in the audit says what specifically makes the behavior hard, with a source
- Every activity names the role that owns the lever it pulls
- The participation rung is stated plainly and matched by the plan's actual design
- The five diffusion attributes are applied and produce at least one design change
- A method for identifying influential members of the network is described
- Reinforcing links between activities are written out explicitly
Building the multi-level plan this week?
Send the scoring guide and the setting you are working in. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with a real level audit, named owners for every lever and the diffusion attributes applied, and revisions run until the grade lands.