Community Readiness Model

The Community Readiness Model is an innovative method for assessing the level of readiness of a community to develop and implement prevention programming. It can be used as both a research tool to assess levels of readiness across a group of communities or as a tool to guide prevention efforts at the individual community level.

The community readiness model defines 9 stages of readiness.

• No awareness
• Denial/resistance
• Vague awareness
• Preplanning
• Preparation
• Initiation
• Stabilization
• Confirmation/Expansion
• High Level of Community Ownership

Assessment of readiness is done for 6 key dimensions

A: Efforts

B: Community Knowledge of Efforts

C: Leadership

D: Community Climate

E: Community Knowledge of the Issue

F: Resources.

A level of readiness, from 1 to 9, is assigned to each dimension. Strategy development then relies on these community readiness scores, with dimensions with the lowest levels of readiness typically being addressed first.

The process for conducting a community readiness assessment includes:

• identifying the issue,
• defining the community,
• conducting key respondent interviews,
• scoring to determine the readiness levels, and
• developing strategies consistent with those readiness levels.

Typically 6-10 key respondent interviews are conducted, with each respondent answering a set of 20-36 questions. Key respondents are carefully chosen to represent an important part of the overall community (school, government, medical). Completed interviews are independently scored by two individuals who then determine a consensus score for each dimension of each interview. Final dimension scores are obtained by averaging (dimension) scores across all interviews; the overall score is then calculated as the average of the six dimension scores.