Positive Deviance

The classic model of the diffusion of social change is one where the change comes from outside. Experts try to persuade people to adopt new ways and often look for charismatic locals to lead the change.

A newer model, Positive Deviance, tries to approach the idea of change from a different angle.

In the struggle to achieve participation and not simply persuasion, it has been found that local wisdom will usually be better than outside expertise.  This model also proposes that if people can be brought along as participants, even the most intractable problems can be solved.

In 1990, Jerry and Monique Sternin arrived in Hanoi to open a branch of the U.S. NGO, Save the Children.  At that time two-thirds of Vietnamese children under five were suffering from malnutrition. The Sternins hoped to find ways to help with this as supplemental feeding had already failed.

They initially travelled to the Quong Xuong District. There they weighed 2,000 children under the age of three and discovered that 64% of them were malnourished.  The Sternins weren’t the first people to discover this but they were the first to ask a very important question.

Were any of the well-nourished children they had encountered from very poor families?

The answer was ‘yes.’  Some of the children were well nourished even though their families were just as poor as those of the malnourished children.  These families were exhibiting positive deviant behaviour.

So the Sternins studied them.  What were they doing that was so different?

It turned out that the mothers in these families were all doing a number of things –

  • Collecting tiny shrimp and crabs from the paddy fields and adding them to the children’s meals.
  • Adding sweet potato greens to the meals.
  • Feeding the children three or four times a day instead of the customary twice.
  • Actively feeding the children, making sure they ate and that no food was wasted.
  • Washing their children’s hands before and after they ate.

Now they knew the key to the nourishment of the local children but how would they convince the villagers? They struggled to come up with ideas until a village elder reminded them of a local saying – “A thousand hearings isn’t worth one seeing, and a thousand seeing isn’t worth one doing.”

The Sternins designed a pilot project where local mothers agreed to work for two weeks with the ‘positive deviant’ mothers, harvesting the shrimps and greens, encouraging the children to eat, feeding them more often and washing their hands.

They were at all times encouraged to ‘do.’  They weighed their children every day and plotted the data on their own charts.  Within two weeks they could see the changes in their children for themselves.

This pilot project continued for two years after which malnutrition had decreased by 85% where the Positive Deviance approach was implemented.  Over the next several years this approach was used all over Vietnam and helped more than 2.2 million people improve their nutritional status.

The interview below is with Monique Sternin and demonstrates not only the success of this project but also beautifully shows how much the way we interact with others – all others – impacts on the outcome.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9suSYL6RU&w=420&h=315]

10 Comments

  1. This is really interesting and fits in with what I’m studying with the Open University. I’m a huge fan of the power of community development where people actively come together, engage and promote change and improvement in their communities. There is a little community here in Highland where there was a lot of vandalism, drugs were a problem and health issues were a serious concern. The powers that be tried to initiate all sorts of project unsuccessfully to try to change this. Then the community came up with the idea of planting lots of pots and hanging baskets that would brighten the little village and these would be looked after and watered by volunteers. They managed to secure funding from the local council and slowly it began to take shape. The have over the years won awards for their project and they have a waiting list of volunteers of all ages who want to take part. The result has been that vandalism has significantly increased and the social capital in the wee village has increased. Power to the people eh 😉 The strange thing is that the funders would never have come up with this idea as a successful way of promoting engagement and change within this community.

  2. Positive deviance–that phrase has totally captured my imagination. I just realized I have been advocating exactly that approach for my critterly friends to continue their quest eastward into the Light at http://granbee.wordpress.com Those peasants who were raising well-nourished children remind me of my mother on our farm where I grew up. She had learned from her mother during the American Great Depression years, utilizing everyt resource with imagination and determination and consistency. My maternal grandmother also taught these practices to other women in government run classes to established home industries and improve public health in those years.

    1. I was really entranced by the phrase, too. I have been thinking about how it might apply to behavioral issues. I love the idea of “positive deviance” as a way to model more prosocial behaviors, although how to do that sort of escapes me……
      Great post, very thought provoking.

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