SASA! Stages of Change
Change takes time and commitment. It isn’t until we identify a problem that we start to sense a need to change something in our lives. First we seek out information and then we find support, and only when we feel ready do we make a change and try to sustain it. In SASA! we need to understand how individuals change, so that we can facilitate a process of community-wide change. The Stages of Change Model explains how individuals experience change.
(Adapted from: Prochaska J., DiClemente C., Norcross J., (1992). In search of how people change -- applications to addictive behaviors, American Psychologist, 47(9), 1102-1114).
While this process is not always linear, with individuals moving neatly from one stage to the next, we have found this model to describe the process of individual change for people from many backgrounds and cultures. Think about some of the changes you have made in your own life. Do these stages reflect what you experienced? In SASA!, we start by influencing individual change, but we can’t stop there. We need individuals to begin making changes in their own lives and then collectively change their community’s norms. Therefore, SASA!, is organized into four phases based on the Stages of Change Model and scaled up to the community level into the phases of community mobilization. These four phases ensure that community members are systematically guided through a process of change.
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