Promoting Health for Hispanic Women

The current featured ANS artice addresses the challenge of cultural diversity and understanding cultural factors that influence health.  This article, titled “Evaluation of 3 Behavioral Theories for Application in Health Promotion Strategies for Hispanic Women” by Daisy S. Garcia, PhD, MSN, examines these complex issues.  The article is available to download at no cost while it is featured on the ANS website, and we invite you to read this article and return here to share your comments!  Here is

Daisy Garcia

Dr. Garcia’s message for ANS readers about her work:

I want to thank ANS for giving me the opportunity to share this article with its readers—particularly with those who work in finding ways to enhance the health of Hispanic/Latino women living in the Unites States.

Behavior modification is key for a healthy life, free of diseases. This task can be difficult to achieve in diverse populations such as Hispanic women. There are a variety of ways in which this group of women differs. For example, independent of the number of years that Hispanic women have lived in the U.S., some women maintain strong cultural believes, while others easily acculturate and adopt new behaviors to function effectively in different environments. The obstacles that Hispanic women need to overcome to access health care are additional factors that may limit health practitioners’ ability to reach these women in order to educate and inform them about practicing healthy behaviors. Health education through health promotion programs are instruments that can successfully achieve health-enhancing behavioral change—specifically, those programs designed using a theoretical framework that suggests ways to attain positive behavior change.    

My experience working with Hispanic women and my background as an educator led me to look into health promotion strategies addressing Hispanic women as well as to identify the theories guiding these strategies so that I could incorporate them into my teachings. Through this quest, I found that information on the selection of theories suitable for developing a health strategy catering to the diverse population of Hispanic women was scarce. In this article, I analytically evaluate two of the most common behavioral theories in health promotion and a nursing theory in the context of access to U.S. health care by Hispanic women. This evaluation is completed using a practical instrument, as the purpose of this article is also to offer readers an example of theory evaluation with a less complex, yet complete and reliable theory evaluation instrument to fit health promotion strategies.