Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 31, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 22, 2022
Children's COOPeration Denmark (Child-COOP) feasibility study design: a participatory system dynamics approach targeting childhood health in a small Danish community
ABSTRACT
Background:
Improving childhood health is complex due to the multi-factorial nature and interaction of determinants. To facilitate shared understanding of structures and relationships that determine children's health behavior, participatory system approaches has shown promising potential.
Objective:
This paper describes a design to examine the feasibility and acceptability of the participatory system approach intervention (Child-COOP) and the study procedures for a future scale-up controlled trial.
Methods:
The feasibility study is designed as a process evaluation of the intervention and the evaluation design using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The setting is a small rural town in Denmark, Havndal, with children as the primary target group. Group Model Building, a participatory system dynamics method, will be used to engage the community, create consensus of the drivers of childhood health, identify local opportunities and develop context specific actions.
Results:
The Child-COOP feasibility study will test the participatory system dynamics approach to intervention and evaluation design and survey objective measures of childhood health behavior and well-being among the ~100 children (6-13 y) attending the local primary school. Community level data will also be collected. We will assess the contextual factors, implementation of interventions and mechanisms of impact as part of a process evaluation. Data will be collected at baseline and at 2 and 4 years of follow up.
Conclusions:
The potential of this participatory system dynamics approach includes opportunities for community engagement and local capacity building to improve children’s health and health behavior, and this feasibility study holds the potential to prepare an upscaling of the intervention for effectiveness testing. Clinical Trial: Ethical approval for the study has been granted by The Regional Scientific Ethics Committee of the Central Denmark Region, Danish National Committee on Health Research Ethics (1-10-72-283-21).
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