The Transtheoretical Model and stages of change: a critique

The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) has for some time now enjoyed fame (or even notoriety). Indeed, Health Education Research has been pleased to publish a number of articles over recent years. We were especially pleased to publish Adams and White’s (Adams and White, 2004) interesting and arguably heretical paper which appears in this edition of the Journal (and was published in advance on our website). We felt this would be an excellent opportunity to repeat our recent venture in which we invited a Commentary Group of distinguished researchers to react to three articles on the European Smoking Prevention Framework Approach in Health Education Research, 18(6), 664–677 (2003). Accordingly, we invited six equally distinguished commentators to provide a critical review of the TTM. We are very grateful to these six colleagues for their efforts—and, of course, we thank Jean Adams and Martin White for not only agreeing to their paper being subjected to critical scrutiny, but actively encouraging debate on a subject that is partly technical and partly ideological! Keith Tones Executive Editor