Book Review Public Health Communication: Evidence for Behavior Change, Robert C. Hornik (ed.).

Despite supportive evidence, the debate continues as to whether public health communication can change health behavior. Early community-based trials such as the Stanford Five City Program1 and COMMIT2 produced ambiguous or no evidence that health communication affected health-risk behaviors. But other research began to appear that demonstrated that such communication could effect change.3 This supportive evidence, along with the articles cited below in this volume, demonstrates that behavior change did occur in the context of community-wide campaigns such as the National High Blood Pressure Education Program,4 the California and Massachusetts antismoking campaigns,5,6 the North Carolina highway safety program,7 and others. The editor of this reader, Public Health Communication, espouses the hypothesis that public health communica-tion can change health behaviors, and his selection of international research supports this. The collection of 19 papers assembled in this volume address the evidence for change in signifi-cant ways. The editor explains that his three major criteria in selecting the papers demonstrate (a) strong evidence of change in specific health behavior at a population level; (b) major exposure of the population to public health communication messages concerning that behavior; and (c) coher-ent evidence and a sensible narrative that attributes the change, at least in part, to the communica