Spreading Success Beyond the Laboratory: Applying the RE-AIM Framework for Effective Environmental Communication Interventions at Scale^*

* Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2014 National Communication Association Annual Convention in Chicago, IL and the 2017 International Communication Association Annual Conference in San Diego, CA.

ABSTRACT

The RE-AIM framework, created by Russell Glasgow and colleagues, addresses five major factors involved with sustained population-level effectiveness of public health interventions—Reach, Efficacy and/or Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance. In this article, I illustrate how the framework might be applied to environmental communication interventions, and discuss how the framework needs to be adapted to important aspects of this context. Following that, I address several potential criticisms of RE-AIM or its usefulness for environmental communication scholars. Finally, I discuss how research practices of environmental communication scholars could be changed in light of the insights given by the RE-AIM framework. Much work remains to be done in order to see exactly how RE-AIM, or other frameworks focused on large-scale intervention effectiveness, can be made most useful to environmental communication scholars. However, RE-AIM already provides a valuable way to start thinking about how to best improve large-scale effectiveness of communication interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Research-practice gap
• applied
• practitioners
• interventions
• effectiveness

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Edward Maibach and Steven Woods for their excellent feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article, in addition to the extremely helpful feedback of the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2014 National Communication Association Annual Convention in Chicago, IL and the 2017 International Communication Association Annual Conference in San Diego, CA.

1. While the present article is the first to suggest application of RE-AIM to environmental communication, other scholars have previously discussed reach, efficacy, adoption, implementation and/or maintenance in the context of communication interventions. One previous paper suggested using RE-AIM in the context of health communication (Maibach, Van Duyn, & Bloodgood, 2006). For an earlier discussion of the tradeoffs between reach and other factors in increasing communication campaign impacts, see Flora, Saphir, Schooler, and Rimal (1997) and Schooler, Chaffee, Flora, and Roser (1998). For a discussion of translational research in health communication, see Parrott (2008). For more discussion of RE-AIM type factors in communication, see Flay (1987) or Rice and Atkin (2012).