Abstract
In recent years, community-based health promotion initiatives have been increasingly adopted as a way to support reduction of health inequalities and increased control over health and its determinants in place-based communities. However, as communities are complex settings, place-based initiatives are also complex and most often involve a variety of different stakeholders and sectors, working collaboratively in the form of local partnerships, with an aim to co-create community-based health promotion initiatives.
This study proposes a novel approach to researching community-based intersectoral partnerships and actions. It draws on a case study of a community health promotion initiative, which aims to increase the physical activity levels of people living in different cities in a health district in the south of Valencia, Spain, through working in an intersectoral partnership between the health centre and the local government. The research took a participatory approach to the planning, implementation and evaluation of the initiative, using theory of change methods, informed by a systems thinking approach, theory-based evaluation and qualitative research. It showed that a participatory approach can be empowering through supporting stakeholders to engage in the co-creation of a programme and that being informed by systems thinking can support taking into account contextual factors and their influence on the initiatives. The research also showed how in this combined approach, it can be both “epistemic” (producing knowledge) and “transformative” (empowering those participating in it) while contributing to improving the decision-making process for the planning and evaluation of local intersectoral actions to promote health).
This chapter is based on the work of Dr. Paredes-Carbonell in La Ribera Health Department (Valencia, Spain) (Egea-Ronda et al., 2022, in press) and draws upon the work of Dr. Cassetti carried out during her PhD in Public Health at the University of Sheffield (Cassetti 2020)
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Cassetti, V., Paredes-Carbonell, J.J. (2022). Participatory Approaches to Researching Intersectoral Actions in Local Communities: Using Theory of Change, Systems Thinking and Qualitative Research to Engage Different Stakeholders and to Foster Transformative Research Processes. In: Potvin, L., Jourdan, D. (eds) Global Handbook of Health Promotion Research, Vol. 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97212-7_25
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