title: Empowerment for healthy nutrition in German communities: a study framework.
abstract: Empowerment is seen as a key strategy for sustainable health promotion efforts. However, there is only limited research on how to link the empowerment approach to the promotion of healthy eating, which is a major current public health issue. The article presents the development of a study framework for implementing and evaluating an empowerment intervention for healthy nutrition. This framework was created for a community intervention study meaning to involve elderly citizens in Bavaria, Germany. The study protocol was developed in an iterative process basing on (i) literature reviews on the topics empowerment in relation to healthy nutrition and mixed-methods evaluation, (ii) workshops with empowerment and public health experts and (iii) consultations with local community representatives. Through these measures we identified good practice criteria as well as specific challenges of integrating empowerment and healthy nutrition, e.g. engaging people in healthy nutrition, reconciling participants' nutrition preferences with public health nutrition priorities and evaluating bottom-up activities in the community. Consequences for the study design were deducted from the literature and the consultations, e.g. practical recommendations as to how power could be gradually assigned to group members. A qualitative mixed-method evaluation design was chosen to capture emergent empowerment processes. The study framework presented here is the first on empowerment and nutrition to provide explicit guidance on how empowerment may be applied to healthy nutrition and implemented and evaluated in the community context.
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brandstetter
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Janina
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Curbach
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Verena
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lindacher
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Jana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rueter
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Berit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Warrelmann
authors.affiliation: Medical Sociology, University of Regensburg, Dr.-Gessler-Straße 17, D-93051 Regensburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Julika
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Loss
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003256:Community Participation; D000072001:Diet, Healthy; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005502:Food; D005858:Germany; D006266:Health Education; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D011209:Power, Psychological
keywords: community health promotion; community participation; empowerment; evaluation design; nutrition