How a print resource on policy change was used by community and public health practitioners.

both inform and guide the practice of people working in the field of health promotion. While there is a large body of literature on diffusion of innovation and knowledge utilization, there have been few efforts to establish normative rates on how print resources are being used by community and public health practitioners. According to Rogers, 1 diffusion of innovation proceeds through four stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision and implementation. With respect to a print resource, then, there would be a proportion of people who are unaware of the resource (no awareness), know about the resource but have not used it (knowledge), are persuaded about the usefulness of the resource in their direct work and have recommended it to colleagues (persuasion), have decided to use the resource in the near future (decision), and have used the resource as needed or as intended (implementation). Rogers suggests that imple-menters will then seek to expand their knowledge base with additional, confirming information and research. This report describes the results of a telephone survey designed to determine the extent and ways in which one print resource was being used by community and public health practitioners. METHOD A telephone survey was conducted with a sample of recipients of " Making a Difference in Your Community: A Guide for Policy Change " , 2 a resource prepared, produced and disseminated by the Ontario Public Health Association (OPHA) with funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health. In the guide, a step-by-step approach to the process of local-level health-promoting policy change is provided and 19 community stories are used to illustrate the practical considerations when advancing a policy agenda. Copies of the guide were distributed in one of three ways: through direct, unso-licited mail; upon request; and at workshops and training events designed to support the resource. guides were distributed. While the guide was translated into French, comparatively fewer (N=284) copies of the French version were disseminated. Telephone contacts with a sample of English guide recipients were made between December 15, 1995 and February 20, 1996. The survey instrument contained both forced-choice and open-ended items. The length of time between guide receipt and telephone survey ranged from one to eight months, with a mode of seven months and a mean of six months. The final sample consisted of 88 respondents out of an originally selected sample of 100. The sample was culled from the pool of guide recipients who had …