For those eager to use or curious to explore the many faces of the powerful and transformative Positive Deviance approach, you will find that the following new case studies and publications contain the many ways and sectors this approach has been applied.
Featured Publications:
By: Khadijah Breathett, Lindsay N Kohler, Charles B Eaton, Nora Franceschini, Lorena Garcia, Liviu Klein, Lisa W Martin, Heather M Ochs-Balcom, Aladdin H Shadyab, Crystal W Cené
Nations around the world are struggling with their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, they seek guidance on what works best in terms of preventive measures, treatments, and public health, economic and other policies. Can we use the novel approach of data-powered positive deviance to improve the guidance being offered?
Using Narrative Evidence to Convey Health Information on Social Media: The Case of COVID-19
By: Anat Gesser-Edelsburg
During disease outbreaks or pandemics, policymakers must convey information to the public for informative purposes (e.g., morbidity or mortality rates). They must also motivate the public to cooperate with the guidelines, specifically by changing its usual behavior. Policymakers have traditionally adopted a didactic and formalistic stance by conveying dry and statistics-based health information to the public. They have not yet considered the alternative of providing health information in the form of narrative evidence, using stories that address both cognitive and emotional aspects. The aim of this viewpoint paper is to introduce policymakers to the advantages of using narrative evidence during a disease outbreak or pandemic such as COVID-19. Throughout human history, authorities have tended to employ apocalyptic narratives during disease outbreaks or pandemics. This viewpoint paper proposes an alternative coping narrative that includes the following components: segmentation, barrier reduction, role models, empathy and support, strengthening self/community-efficacy and coping tools, preventing stigmatization of at-risk populations, and communicating uncertainty.
By: Pavlos Delias
The building permits process is a process that commonly within Europe is a municipal responsibility. It is a rather complex process because it comprises hundreds of activities, in a great variety of sequences. In 2015, five Dutch municipalities opened their data for the Business Process Intelligence Challenge (BPIC), hoping to get evidence-based insights about their process. One important issue concerns the outsourcing of some of the activities. This work tries to support this critical outsourcing decision. Following the positive deviance paradigm that suggests that positive deviant cases could act as best practices, we apply process analytics to check two hypotheses: If process flows differ within the categories (positive, normal) of cases, and if flow differences can actually recommend which activities should be outsourced. Initial results suggest that our methodology can provide valuable decision support, yet current work is limited to performance-wise elements.
By: Zelalem Tafese, Anchamo Anato
In Ethiopia, open defecation is a wide spread practice and this practice facilitates the transmission of infections. The main purpose of this study is to test the application of the Positive deviance (PD) approach on solving open defecation practice of the community. The approach uses solutions that already exist in the community to bring about sustainable behavioral and social change.
This publication highlights “approaches that work" in facilitating the integration of Roma minority into the majority population of Slovakia with examples from four different villages.