Active Living Program News


Federal Grant to Look Closely at Active Living Every Day

Over the next three years, researchers from Klein Buendel, Kaiser Permanente, and Healthy EverAfters will conduct surveys and interviews of Active Living Every Day providers as well as those organizations that chose not to provide the program. The investigators hope to identify key organizational factors that predict why some groups will adopt and implement an evidence-based physical activity program and why others don’t. The study is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, an arm of the National Institutes of Health.

Andrea Dunn, PhD, research scientist at Klein Buendel and principal investigator for the study, explains why this grant is important: “The public health community is concerned that evidence-based programs are not being used more widely. We now have many effective programs for increasing physical activity, improving diet, and preventing drug use, and they’re not being used to the extent that they could and should be used. NIH wants to encourage research to study the science of dissemination and diffusion and has issued a special program announcement, Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health, to encourage researchers to conduct studies in this area.”

The researchers will survey and interview Active Living Every Day program providers and decision makers in two control groups: those who requested more information about Active Living Every Day but decided not to train for and offer the program, and people who received promotional brochures about Active Living Every Day but didn’t request additional information. Providers will also be asked about ways they may have modified the program to make it a better fit for their organization and the population they serve. Participants will be categorized by the sector they represent: worksites, community organizations, health care clinics or hospitals, and fitness centers.

This sector- and organization-level approach makes the study somewhat unique, as opposed to a study of the effects on the end user. In addition, Dunn says, “There is so little information about dissemination out there. We are starting from an observational point of view. This is how scientific studies begin. For example, observational studies of populations provided the first evidence of the relation between physical activity and health outcomes. These first observational studies will provide very important information to help us understand organizational behavior.”

A special supplement to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in October 2006 focused on diffusion and dissemination of physical activity programs and was edited by David Buller and Erwin Bettinghaus from Klein Buendel. Dunn explains that this set of papers provides the framework for understanding how important this type of research is to improving health. In the afterword of the supplement, Dunn and Bettinghaus write, “…continuing research on the topic of diffusion and dissemination will be equally vital. …Both will be more and more essential as we try to measure and increase physical activity in many industrialized countries where sedentary lifestyle and its unhealthful consequences are increasingly the norm among children and adults.”

To learn more about the investigators for this study or Active Living Partners programs, see below.

Sources

Dunn, Andrea L., and Erwin P. Bettinghaus. 2006. Diffusion and dissemination for Increasing physical activity in world populations. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 31 (4S), S94-S95.

Study of the naturalistic dissemination process of an evidence-based program. March 15, 2007. KB Updates News Section. www.kleinbuendel.com. Accessed March 28, 2007.



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