Evaluating progress of obesity prevention: What should communities be doing?

Substantial investments are being made by communities across the nation in obesity prevention efforts. To learn from these local-level efforts and inform future action, it is critical to understand the impacts and value of these investments. Yet there is little harmonization of evaluation efforts, making it challenging to know who is doing what, and what works where and under what circumstances. Communities also differ widely with respect to intervention and evaluation resources and capacity. In recognition of both the need for coordinated evaluation efforts and the differences in community capacity for evaluation, the Committee on Evaluating Progress of Obesity Prevention Efforts developed recommendations for evaluation plans, indicators, and methods to meet the diverse needs of community settings. We will describe current data systems available for use in local evaluations and gaps in these systems; recommended indicators to assess progress in infrastructure, policy and environment change efforts across and within multiple environments, and describe population-level behavioral and obesity impacts; evaluation designs; analytic methods; and approaches to sharing and visualizing data and findings. We will discuss which approaches and methods are best suited for larger and smaller communities. Our aim is to support evaluators with suggestions that they can adapt to their local context. An example of how to apply this plan will be presented.