This study aims to explore risk factors and risk behaviours that factory and construction workers are
facing at both individual and community levels as well as to examine existing health promotion interventions.
These information are consequently used for constructing useful recommendations for the development of
existing and new interventions by employing ‘social marketing’ principles; it is not designed for social
marketing interventions evaluation. Research team was assigned to embed in the purposively selected
factory and construction workers communities to collect qualitative data, namely lifestyles, social value, as
well as risk behaviours and risk factors. Afterward a cross-sectional survey was implemented basing on first
set of data obtained from qualitative investigations. Finally the data from both methods were analysed and
presented to the communities’ representatives in focus group discussions. This is to verify and explore crucial
explanations underpinning the findings, moreover it was expected that these findings would be beneficial to
the people in the communities.
It was found that although factory and construction workers had a number of constraints in terms of
purchasing power and time because they received relatively low payments with high workloads, they were
offered with convenience and motivation to access to unhealthy products e.g. alcohol drinks and tobacco.
Therefore in order to develop health promotion interventions that are suitable for these groups, health
promoters need to understand the context and be able to seek for ways to increase burdens to access to
those products.
It can be observed that legal interventions i.e. restriction on alcohol-selling time and restriction on
age of tobacco buyers did not perform efficiently, especially in factory and construction workers; thus,
commonly-known recommendation is that strengthening law enforcement is the key factor for the legal
interventions to be succeeded. On the contrary, this study pointed that the use of social marketing principles
to communicate with the target group regarding the true purposes and relevant facts of the interventions.
Selection of information to be communicated with the target group is also very crucial that health
promoters select information that is suitable for and relevant to knowledge, social values, and attitudes that
influence the target population. For instance, if a provision of new information is not fit well with their
attitudes, this can lead to a denial of adopting the new information. Conversely, if the new information is
compatible with their attitudes, it is likely that the target group will easily understand and adopt the healthy
message for their behaviour changes. Therefore to understand way of thinking, belief, and attitudes of the
studied population is very essential for health promotion communication.It is recommended that social marketing should initially be applied for promoting behaviours that are
easy to change and require low costs for the changes e.g. limiting smoking areas (rather than asking them to
quit smoking) or stop drinking in certain period of time (rather than asking them to suddenly stop drinking).
This is to offer reachable targets to the population and once they can achieve such a goal, they would be
proud of themselves and believe in their abilities, and this will help them to step up to reach more difficult
goals e.g. stop smoking or drinking.
It is widely accepted that effectiveness of social marketing interventions in persuading target
population to adopt health message to change their behaviours depends on internal factors which are the use
of language and level of motivations (e.g. peer or social pressures) in the interventions and the positive and
negative responses of the target group. Moreover external factor, e.g. fear of disease pandemic, or economic
factors also play important roles. As a result, a continual monitoring and evaluation of the intervention for its
improvement can make interventions well-run and able to keep pace with dynamic changes of both internal
and external factors.
In order to apply the principles of social marketing in practices, key points that health promoters
should employed are (1) to conduct formative study of the target population on their behaviours including
their responses to the interventions, (2) to develop, test, and then implement the interventions, and (3) to
monitor and evaluate the implemented interventions. In addition it is recommended that health promoters
should be aware of external factors which are very influential to behaviour changes of target population.
The Thai Health Promotion Foundation, governmental bodies and NGOs have been investing large
amount of funding in social marketing interventions. However, it was found that there are limited numbers of
literatures available on the effectiveness including an estimation of impacts of social marketing interventions.
The authors therefore suggested that further studies on this area should be conducted in systematic manner
as it would enhance an acceptance and use of social marketing principles, which is proved to be able to
tackle public health problems at national level.