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Demographic and epidemiological transitions in an era of social and economic uncertainty have provoked a pervasive elder health care crisis. Engaged anthropology using formative research is propitious for addressing elder health and care needs. Formative research is an iterative, multistage participatory process that draws on multiple methods and actors to develop, monitor, and assess community-congruent interventions. It entails becoming informed about and informing community dialogue; identifying needs and resources; generating intervention options via critical assessment and problem solving; and monitoring process, outcome, and responses. This chapter details how formative research was conducted in a small city in Chiapas (Mexico's southernmost state) to improve primary elder health care while engaging elders, care providers, researchers, and media.

This chapter describes Project QTI, a pioneering attempt to find out what we need to know to successfully carry out tobacco cessation in clinical and community settings. Formative research carried out in India and Indonesia is described. Both countries have high prevalence rates of tobacco use across all social classes, popular indigenous as well as imported tobacco products, few cessation activities, and no established tobacco curriculum in medical schools. A biopolitical model is presented for encouraging systematic assessment of tobacco dependency at the sites of the body, environment, and state. The tobacco control field recognizes the value of transdisciplinary research. The chapter describes Project QTI's ongoing attempts to build a community of tobacco cessation practice that spans both efforts to encourage individuals to quit tobacco use and communities to establish smoke free households and worksites.

Formative research is the critical step in designing a social marketing campaign. It is a multistage process that in practice often ends up being condensed. The steps include environment scanning (or situation analysis), exploratory research, concept testing, and pretesting. Formative research is used to refine and settle on a theory-based campaign approach. This chapter offers practical guidance on when and how to apply specific formative research methods and case examples of their use in real-world campaign design. The chapter explores how formative research can be used for audience segmentation and reviews the case example of the Heart Truth campaign to promote women’s awareness of heart disease as the leading cause of death among adult women.

Brand equity is the higher order construct that captures the effects of commercial and public health brands on outcomes. This chapter focuses on the effects of brand equity on individual health behaviour, but effects on upstream outcomes are important topics for future research. Brand equity mediates the effects of message exposure on consumer choice and health behaviour.

The convergence around best practice also opens up opportunities for divergence and conflict within and among the enactment of those best practices. Using a production of culture approach, this chapter traces how AIDS organizations in Accra put best practices into practice, and identifies moments of entropy that emerge when designers produce campaigns. In a field that has converged around the value of incorporating formative research into the design process, organizations make themselves distinct by doing formative research differently. These divergences, namely whether organizations collect categorical or narrative data from audiences, lead them to produce campaigns with what I call “categorical” and “narrative” styles. Different styles produce more or less effective campaigns, undermining the intended goals of AIDS organizations. Organizations incorporate “cultural ombudsmen” into the design process who draw moral and cultural symbolic boundaries around the appropriateness of campaign ideas. Obmudsmen, with their veto power, can squash campaign ideas that designers like best and that have the support of communities, putting the practices of formative research and securing buy-in in conflict. This opens campaigns up to entropy, as organizations put out “lowest common denominator” campaigns that may have less resonance and lack organizational support.

Social marketing has a growing evidence base. However, there are challenges in reviewing the literature due to inconsistent reporting and description of programs. There has been growth in the evidence base both through more rigorous evaluation of social marketing campaigns, including large efforts in tobacco control, obesity prevention, and drug use. There is growing recognition of the importance of monitoring and process evaluation. But, gaps in the evidence persist, and application of the full spectrum of benchmark criteria and research continuum stages discussed in Chapter 1 is often lacking. Gaps in the current evidence base should be filled using innovative methods and by harnessing new technologies, such as social media and mobile devices.

This chapter focuses on formative research and how it can be used to inform the design of educational games. It first provides an overview of what formative research is and what the formative process looks like before turning to a discussion of the project at the Center for Children and Technology in which formative research was used to guide game design and development. In particular, it describes two formative activities designed to improve students' reading comprehension with the aid of pictures of different speakers and communities of usage as well as images containing words with multiple meanings.

Qualitative research provides an adaptable, open-ended, rigorous method to explore local perceptions of an issue. Qualitative approaches are effective at revealing the subjective logic motivating behavior. They are particularly appropriate for research questions that are exploratory in nature or involve issues of meaning rather than magnitude or frequency. Key advantages of qualitative approaches include speed, flexibility and high internal validity resulting from emphasis on rapport building and ability to probe beneath the surface of initial responses. Given the time-intensive nature of qualitative analysis, samples tend to be small and purposively selected to assure every interview counts. Qualitative studies can be done independently or embedded in mixed-method designs. Qualitative data analysis depends on rigorous reading and rereading texts ideally with more than one analyst to confirm interpretations. Computer software is useful for analyzing large data sets but manual coding is often sufficient for rapid assessments in field settings..