This issue of Family and Community Health focuses on best practices in family and community health promotion. Best practices, a term often found in the business literature, is defined as a technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to be the best path to a desired result.1 More specifically, best practices in health promotion or healthcare are "those sets of processes and activities that are consistent with health promotion values and goals, theories and beliefs, evidence and understanding of the environment, and that are most likely to achieve health promotion goals in a given situation.2 Thus, best practices are helpful in guiding the development, implementation, and evaluation of effective health promotion interventions. The articles presented in this issue of Family and Community Health address best practices for different topics, ranging from assessment of health needs of communities to health promotion among families. While some of the articles synthesize previous research to establish "best practices" in a certain research area, other articles describe studies that have used best practices to develop new intervention approaches.

The first 3 articles in this issue focus on best practices related to community needs assessments and community-based programs. In the first article, "A Comprehensive, Multitiered, Targeted Community Needs Assessment Model: Methodology, Dissemination, and Implementation," Finifter and colleagues describe how to integrate empirical evidence and data collected from multiple community groups. They also describe the use of an action-oriented approach in which the needs assessment is followed by dissemination of findings and implementation of identified solutions to have a positive impact on the community. Griffin and colleagues in "A Development of Multidimensional Scales to Measure Key Leaders' Perceptions of Community Capacity and Organizational Capacity for Teen Pregnancy Prevention" describe the development of scales that are useful to measure one aspect of community needs assessments. They describe how these scales can be utilized as either process or impact measures to assess the effect of interventions targeting community capacity. The third article, "Adult Roles in Community-based Youth Empowerment Programs: Implications for Best Practice," by Messias and colleagues discusses qualitative data that explore the perspectives and experiences of adults actively engaged with youth empowerment programs. Findings from this study provide guidance for the development of best practices in community-based youth empowerment programs.

The next article is related to best practices using the family as the health promotion target. "Predictors of Adaptation in Icelandic and American Families of Young Children With Chronic Asthma" discusses the relationship between several family-related constructs such as sense of coherence and family hardiness and families' adaptation to a child's chronic disease. Svavarsdottir and colleagues present results that underscore the importance of strengthening individual and family resiliency as a mechanism for improving family adaptation and functioning. The last article entitled "The ABCs of Health Literacy" by Mika and colleagues has implications for best practices in all areas of health promotion and healthcare. This article reviews different aspects of health literacy and presents an interdisciplinary model for improving health literacy. An increased focus on the improvement of health literacy in the United States will provide an important contribution to the resolution of health disparities in this country.

This collection of manuscripts discusses best practices in health promotion and healthcare in a variety of topics and provides examples of how to use the best practices literature for intervention development. It is hoped that researchers and practitioners in the fields of health promotion and healthcare will be able to incorporate the presented information in future research and practice endeavors, thereby creating more effective interventions and better healthcare.

Alexandra Evans, PhD, MPH

Issue Editor, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia

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