Evaluation of community-based health promotion interventions in children and adolescents in high-income countries: a scoping review on strategies and methods used

Abstract

Background In recent decades, community-based interventions have been increasingly adopted in the field of health promotion and prevention. While their evaluation is relevant for health researchers, stakeholders and practitioners, conducting these evaluations is also challenging and there are no existing standards yet. The objective of this review is to scope peer-reviewed scientific publications on evaluation approaches used for community-based health promotion interventions. A special focus lies on children and adolescents’ prevention. Methods A scoping review of the scientific literature was conducted by searching three bibliographic databases (Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO). The search strategy encompassed search terms based on the PCC (Population, Concept, Context) scheme. Out of 6,402 identified hits, 44 articles were included in this review. Results Out of the 44 articles eligible for this scoping review, the majority reported on studies conducted in the USA (n = 28), the UK (n = 6), Canada (n = 4) and Australia (n = 2). One study each was reported from Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Scotland, respectively. The included studies described interventions that mostly focused on obesity prevention, healthy nutrition promotion or well-being of children and adolescents. Nineteen articles included more than one evaluation design (e.g., process or outcome evaluation). Therefore, in total we identified 65 study designs within the scope of this review. Outcome evaluations often included randomized controlled trials (RCTs; 34.2%) or specific forms of RCTs (cluster RCTs; 9.8%) or quasi-experimental designs (26.8%). Process evaluation was mainly used in cohort (54.2%) and cross-sectional studies (33.3%). Only few articles used established evaluation frameworks or research concepts as a basis for the evaluation. Conclusion Few studies presented comprehensive evaluation study protocols or approaches with different study designs in one paper. Therefore, holistic evaluation approaches were difficult to retrieve from the classical publication formats. However, these publications would be helpful to further guide public health evaluators, contribute to methodological discussions and to inform stakeholders in research and practice to make decisions based on evaluation results.

Consented indicators for the evaluation of integrated strategies of community health promotion targeting children and adolescents: results of an eDelphi

“…Aspects of the quality of changes and practices can thus be determined. We therefore propose that a combination of process and outcome evaluation designs is an adequate strategy to get a comprehensive picture of more complex and unanticipated impacts of an intervention [ 35 ].…”

Promoting healthy sleep in 0-2-year-old infants: a study protocol for the development and mixed method evaluation of a sleep health program tailored to Dutch youth healthcare regions

“…Furthermore, not only infant sleep outcomes, but also intermediary and parental outcomes are assessed, which increases the studies’ sensitivity to find effects and aids in exploring factors that could be related to changes in infant sleep [ 49 , 70 ]. When evaluating programs in real life settings such as YHC, it is also important to gain insight in program reach, adoption, implementation, maintenance and possible working mechanisms [ 71 , 72 ]. Therefore, a thorough program evaluation is performed by combining a quasi-experimental effect evaluation with a mixed methods process evaluation [ 49 , 71 – 73 ].…”

“…When evaluating programs in real life settings such as YHC, it is also important to gain insight in program reach, adoption, implementation, maintenance and possible working mechanisms [ 71 , 72 ]. Therefore, a thorough program evaluation is performed by combining a quasi-experimental effect evaluation with a mixed methods process evaluation [ 49 , 71 – 73 ].…”

Research Trends on the Effects of Forest Therapy in Korea and Ways to Improve the Level of Medical Evidence: A Scoping Review

“…However, for studies conducted in the communities, it might be difficult to randomize all situations for ethical reasons (Bader et al, 2023). For this reason, efforts must be made to minimize the risk of bias that causes research errors when designing non-RCTs (Morgan et al, 2019;Furuya-Kanamori et al, 2021).…”