Community co-selection of measures to evaluate the health and wellbeing impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community running groups

Rona Macniven, Kim Delbaere, Ebony Lewis, Kylie Radford, Karla Canuto, Michelle Dickson, Justin Richards, Josephine Gwynn, Adrienne Withall

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Abstract

Issue addressed: Physical activity participation can improve the physical health and social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The evaluation of physical activity programmes can elicit a clearer understanding of where these impacts occur and to what extent. We describe applying a collaborative approach to the selection of a set of measures that can be used to examine health and wellbeing impacts of Indigenous community running groups. Methods: Physical activity, health and wellbeing measurement tools previously used with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were collated. Participants in the collaborative process were nine female running group members aged 30+ years from a regional New South Wales (NSW) town. The Indigenous research method, Yarning, explored views of participating in the group on health and wellbeing and how these could be measured using those collated measurement tools. Results: Runners described participating for holistic physical, mental and social reasons and stated the importance of the group participating together and providing social support to each other. There was broad support for the identified physical activity, lifestyle, physical health, and social and emotional wellbeing measures, with social networks and sports injuries identified as additionally relevant. Conclusions: Co-selecting measures to evaluate a physical activity programme for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants can better inform the development of relevant future healthy lifestyle programme evaluation, revealing factors that may be missed as relevant by researchers. So what?: This process presents an example of determining evaluation measures with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants that could be applied more broadly to evaluation design.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)17-23
Number of pages7
JournalHealth Promotion Journal of Australia
Volume34
Issue number1
Early online date28 Mar 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2023

Keywords

  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
  • chronic disease
  • community based intervention
  • participatory action research
  • physical activity

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