Search results

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of community-based and driven approaches during the lockdowns and early periods of the pandemic. The study examines the impact and perceptions of the state-led intervention. This would help to discover a better approach for postpandemic interventions and policy responses.

This article used the inductive method and gathered its data from surveys. In search of global opinions on COVID-19 responses received in communities, two countries in each continent with high COVID-19 infection per 100,000 during the peak period were chosen for study. In total, 13 community workers, leaders and members per continent were sampled. The simple percentile method was chosen for analysis. The simple interpretation was used to discuss the results.

The study showed that poor publicity of community-based interventions affected awareness and fame as most were mistaken for government interventions. The study found that most respondents preferred state interventions but preferred many communities or local assessments of projects and interventions while the projects were ongoing to adjust the project and intervention as they progressed. However, many preferred community-based and driven interventions.

State secrecy and perceived opposition oppression limited data sourcing for this study in countries where state interventions are performed in secret and oppression of perceived opposition voices limited data collection in some countries. Thus, last-minute changes were made to gather data from countries on the same continent. An intercontinental study requires data from more countries, which would require more time and resources. This study was affected by access to locals in remote areas where raw data would have benefited the study.

The absence of data from the two most populous countries due to government censorship limits access to over a third of the global population, as they make up 2.8 out of 7 billion.

The choice of two countries in each continent is representational enough, yet the absence of data from the two most populous countries creates a social identity gap.

The survey collected unique and genuine data and presents novel results. Thus, this study provides an important contribution to the literature on the subject. There is a need for maximum support for community-based interventions and projects as well as global data collection on community-based or driven interventions and projects.

Despite the well-known positive effects of fruits and vegetables, their consumption in many countries is lower than those recommended. This study aims to systematically examine the effects of community-based interventions on fruits and vegetables consumption in adults.

To collect relevant publications, the authors searched electronic databases including PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus and Web of Science from January 2000 to July 2021. Considering random models, this study analyzed the data using weighted mean differences (WMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI).

Among 1,621 retrieved publications, 21 articles met the inclusion criteria. The overall effect size demonstrated that, at the end of the trials, the educational interventions increased the consumption of aggregated fruits and vegetables (WMD: 0.55 serving/day, 95%CI: 0.34, 0.77), and vegetables (WMD: 0.15, 95%CI: 0.09, 0.21, I2: 33.2%; p = 0.103) in the intervention groups, compared to the control groups.

The subgroup analyses that were based on the type of interventions (face-to-face education compared to online interventions), location (home-based compared to the other types of interventions) and duration (24 weeks and higher) of interventions, and accompanied financial support reduced between-group heterogeneity. An efficient interventional program on increasing fruits and vegetables consumption should be part of a multi-component project.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no systematic review and meta-analysis has provided a summary of the effects of community-based interventions on fruits and vegetables consumption in adult populations, and there is no fixed conclusion that could be drawn in this regard.

Community-based HIV testing and counselling (HTC) has been recommended for improving access to prevention, care, and treatment services in at-risk populations. Earlier systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been undertaken, but due to some methodological limitations, their findings do not yet provide a practical significance. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the recent evidence of the efficacy of community-based HTC approaches on the uptake of HTC in at-risk populations.

The database of PubMed online, Science Direct, the Lancet Global Health, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Google Scholar were systematically searched using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines to obtain empirical papers published between March 2013 and December 2015.

Of 600 collected papers, there were 6 cluster randomized trials papers which met the inclusion criteria. Compared to the health facilities-based HTC, community-based HTC approaches have been shown to improve the uptake of HIV testing from 5.8 to 37 per cent, and improve HIV testing in men and their partners together from 6.8 to 34 per cent. The community approaches also detected lower HIV-positive cases (0.29 per cent as compared to 4 per cent), improved access to treatment services from 0.3 to 25 per cent, demonstrated higher cluster differentiation 4 count in newly diagnosed patients (median of 400-438 cells/µl), and increased the rate of first-time HIV testing from 9 to 11.8 per cent. With respect to social and behavioural outcomes, community-based HTC increased social norms for HIV testing by 6 per cent (95 per cent CI 3-9), decreased multiple sex partners by 55 per cent (95 per cent CI 42-73), lowered casual sex by 45 per cent (95 per cent CI 33-62), increased knowledge about HIV (83.2 vs 28.9 per cent), improved positive attitudes towards HIV patients (73.0 vs 34.3 per cent), and increased the use of condoms (28.0 vs 12.3 per cent).

Community-based HTC combined with behavioural interventions have been found to be more effective in increasing the uptake of HIV testing as well as other outcomes as compared to the conventional health facilities-based testing and counselling approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how a “holistic approach” is enacted in two interventions accommodating the same target group, young adults with offending behaviour and drug use experiences, but offered in very different contexts, the Prison Service and the community. The aim is to show how enactments of a “holistic approach”, although similar on paper, differ in welfare institutional practices due especially to organisational and structural conditions.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews and written material from and about the two interventions.

Different enactments of a “holistic approach”, due to organisational and structural conditions of the interventions, construct different possibilities for institutional identities. These insights could be useful to take into consideration when discussing prevention initiatives (in a broad sense) for young people with complex problems, including co-occurring offending behaviour and drug use experience.

Research with a focus on citizens with complex problems who do not comply with OR conform to standard welfare institutions are limited. The authors contribute to this literature by focussing on young adults with offending behaviour and drug experiences.

Evidence on implementing effective adolescent mental health promotion and prevention interventions in the European context is underdeveloped. The purpose of this paper is to identify evidence-based mental health promotion and prevention interventions for adolescents that have been developed and/or implemented across the school, community and digital settings in Europe. This review also sought to identify the relevant implementation processes in relation to what works, for whom and under what circumstances.

A narrative synthesis of the evidence was conducted which included two stages: a systematic search of studies assessing adolescent mental health promotion and prevention interventions; and a selection of interventions with the most robust evidence base, using pre-defined criteria, that have been either developed and/or implemented in Europe.

A total of 16 interventions met the inclusion criteria. The majority of interventions were school-based programmes. The review findings support the delivery of interventions aimed at enhancing young people’s social and emotional learning (SEL) and preventing behavioural problems. Results indicate that the effective delivery of SEL interventions on a school-wide basis could provide an important platform on which other universal interventions such as anxiety and bullying prevention, and targeted depression prevention could be developed in a multi-tiered fashion. There were a limited number of studies providing robust evidence on the effectiveness of suicide prevention, digital and community-based interventions.

This review identifies a number of robust evidence-based promotion and prevention interventions for promoting adolescent mental health. While the interventions have been implemented in Europe, the majority has not been evaluated rigorously and few included detailed information on the quality of programme implementation. Evidence of the effective cross-cultural transferability of these interventions needs to be strengthened, including more systematic research on their implementation across diverse country contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to recommend behavioral targets for future interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at college campuses and to advise interventionists on how to choose between many potential behavioral targets.

The authors used the community-based social marketing (CBSM) methodology over two studies. In Study 1, the authors assessed adoption rates (i.e. penetration) and likelihood of adoption (i.e. probability) for 16 potential behavioral targets. In Study 2, the authors used quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the barriers and benefits of engagement in five of the top-performing behaviors from Study 1.

The findings suggest that an intervention to promote purchasing green energy credits (GECs) has a high potential to reduce emissions. Purchasing GECs has a small penetration (<7%) and a large impact (1,405 kgCO₂e/person/year). Compared to the other four behaviors the authors examined in Study 2, purchasing GECs is also more convenient and requires very little time. Thus, the behavior should be appealing to many individuals interested in reducing emissions or protecting the environment.

The authors performed a holistic evaluation of potential behavioral targets that included a barrier and benefit analysis, in addition to the traditional CBSM method of combining impact, probability and penetration.

Hartslag Limburg, a cardiovascular diseases (CVD) prevention programme, integrates a community strategy and a high‐risk strategy. The present paper presents the evaluation design for, and baseline data from, the community intervention. The conceptual framework of the community intervention and its evaluation study were based on programme planning and evaluation models. Within this framework, community organization principles and methods and health education theories and methods were applied. Pre‐test/post‐test control group designs were used to study changes at the individual and the organizational level. The baseline results confirm the need to carry out a comprehensive CVD prevention community project, and the appropriateness of the conceptual model that is used for the development of interventions.

The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.

Knife crime and serious violent crime (SVC) among youth has been growing at an alarming rate in the UK (Harding and Allen, 2021). Community and school-based intervention and prevention services to tackle knife crime are being developed with some evaluation; however, these are independent and of varied quality and rigour. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to record the approaches being developed and synthesise existing evidence of the impact and effectiveness of programmes to reduce knife crime. In addition, the complex factors contributing to knife crime and SVC are discussed.

A systematic approach was used to conduct this knife crime intervention evidence review using two search engines and four databases. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to ensure focus and relevance. The results of searches and decisions by the research team were recorded at each stage using Preferred Reporting Items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA).

Some evidence underpins the development of services to reduce knife crime. Much of the evidence comes from government funded project reports, intervention and prevention services reports, with few studies evaluating the efficacy of intervention programmes at present. Some studies that measured immediate impact in line with the programme’s aims were found and demonstrated positive results.

This systematic review specifically synthesised the evidence and data derived from knife crime and weapon carrying interventions and preventions, integrating both grey and published literature, with a novel discussion that highlights the importance of outcome evaluations and issues with measuring the success of individual level interventions and their contributions to the overall reduction of violence.

The purpose of this paper is to describe non-specialised, group-based interventions in displaced populations from reviewed literature, and to explore their outcomes.

A literature review was conducted using the PubMed database, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews, and defined “grey literature”. Characteristics of the interventions were summarised into a table under key categories such as targeted persons, study setting, level of evidence, outcome measures, assessment tools used and summary of results.

In total, 11 articles were identified stemming from nine separate interventions. Three of these were considered level 1 evidence as they were randomised controlled trials. The described interventions were markedly heterogeneous in nature and produced diverse findings. There were noted methodological issues in the majority of interventions reviewed.

This original research has demonstrated clear need for research that uses robust methodology accounting for the complex and challenging nature of this context.