Addiction: Prochaska's Six Stage Model of Behaviour Change Flashcards
What does Prochaska’s model explain?
Explains process involved in behavioural change that can be used to explain how individuals overcome addiction.
Model takes a positive approach to changing addictive behaviour as opposed to all or nothing approach.
What does Prochaska’s model recognise?
Recognises that people differ in how ready they are to give up addiction and how useful treatment intervention will be depending on which stage individual’s at.
What’s Pre-Contemplation?
Individual doesn’t think they have a problem, isn’t thinking about changing behaviour even though they know it’s not healthy, due to denial/ no motivation.
What’s Contemplation?
Individual’s aware of addiction, thinking about changing behaviour, need to take action.
Aware of costs, but understand benefits outweigh the costs.
What’s Preparation?
Person believes benefits of changing behaviour outweigh the costs.
Decide to change, construct a plan e.g. making a doctor’s appointment.
What’s Action?
When plan’s put into action.
At this stage individual’s done something to change behaviour in last six months e.g. behavioural/ cognitive therapies/ pour away alcohol.
individual develops coping strategies to maintain behaviour change.
What’s Maintenance?
Individual’s maintained change of behaviour for over 6 months.
Focus on relapse prevention, avoiding situations where cues may trigger addiction.
Individual must keep focused.
Must apply coping strategies they’ve learnt and use sources of support available to them to prevent relapse.
What’s Termination?
Newly acquired behaviours become automatic.
Individual no longer turn to addictive behaviour to cope with stress/ anxiety.
Confident in ability to resist behaviour.
No intervention’s required and behaviour change has occurred.
Relapse
According to model, relapse isn’t considered as failure to changing addictive behaviour, can occur at any time.
Individual will simply return to earlier stages e.g. contemplation and preparation.
AO3: Prochaska: Strength
P: Praised because it takes a positive view of relapse.
E: Doesn’t view relapse as failure, but as an inevitable part of the process towards behaviour change.
E: Relapse is more than ‘ slip’ the model takes it seriously, doesn’t underestimate potential to knock an addict off course of recovery.
L: Model is more acceptable as a result of positive outlook on relapse.
AO3: Prochaska: Strength
P: Views recovery from addiction as dynamic process.
E: Early theories view addiction recovery as ‘all or nothing’ event, however Prochaska’s model emphasises the time it takes for recovery, and how it’s a continuous process.
E: Six stages vary from person to person, not all addicts go through stages in same order.
L: Suggests model provides realistic view of complex path of recovery from addiction.
AO3: Prochaska: Weakness
P: Based on self-report methods.
E: Leads to social desirability.
E: Model based on nicotine addicts and changes in thinking when giving up, could’ve lied about how logical thought processes were when giving up to present themselves in best possible light.
L: Reduces internal validity of research into Prochaska’s model of behaviour change.
