Community Readiness to address neighborhood access to physical activity and healthy food: Baseline to Year 1

Introduction

Community Readiness (CR) measures a community’s degree of preparedness to take action on a particular issue. The aim of this study was to use the CR tool to both 1) enhance other evaluative methods that document the impact of environmental and policy changes made in a low-income and ethnically diverse community to reduce childhood obesity, and 2) provide feedback to the implementation team on appropriate strategies.

Methods

The Community Readiness Tool was used in 2014 (baseline) and 2012 to evaluate two issues: 1. Access to healthy foods (HF) and 2. Access to physical activity (PA), in the target community. Participants included randomly recruited community members and those with some intervention involvement/exposure. The validated, semi-structured CR Interview Guide was used to interview participants on either issue. Interviews were analyzed by trained researchers using a scoring guide. Baseline results were compared to year 1 results.

Results

For baseline, 23 individuals were interviewed (18 community members, 3 leaders, 1 school staff). For year 1, 19 individuals were interviewed (8 community members, 7 leaders, 2 school administrators) For Year 1, scoring of interviews showed higher levels of readiness for PA access (preparation stage) than HF access (preplanning stage). Both year 1 scores showed a slight increase over baseline scores. Stage appropriate strategies are being developed to move to the next level of community readiness in the following years.

Conclusions

Community readiness is a health assessment tool that can be easily used in community-based participatory research to assess intervention impact and enhance strategies.