B-challenged: Co-creating Physical and Social Environments to Promote Children's Active Outdoor Play

Official title

B-challenged: A Multi-actor Approach in Creating Safe and Attractive Physical and Social Environments to Promote Children's Active Outdoor Play and Healthy Dietary Behaviours

Overview

BACKGROUND An alarmingly low number of children meet public health guidelines for physical activity and healthy dietary behaviours, and are at increased risk of developing lifestyle-related diseases. Importantly, this burden is already unequally distributed at an early age. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours are driven by complex mechanisms that differ across boys and girls growing up under different socio-economic circumstances. Outdoor play is an important contributor to children's levels of physical activity. Yet, children growing up in underprivileged neighbourhoods play less outside due to limited access to safe and attractive outdoor spaces and appropriate and affordable after school activities than other children. At the same time, today's children have abundant access to inexpensive energy-dense foods and online sedentary activities. AIM B-challenged aims to tackle the complexity of equality in children's active outdoor play and healthy dietary behaviours by co-creating, implementing and evaluating interventions in the physical and social environmental together with children growing up in socio-economically underprivileged neighbourhoods and other key actors. APPROACH B-challenged introduces a multi-actor, inter-sectorial democratic approach in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands), including all key actors (e.g. children, parents, teachers, policy makers). The investigators in B-Challenged will closely collaborate with all key actors, conduct analyses in European cohort data and consider the broader system (e.g. neighbourhood, family) as well as previous lessons-learned. Therewith, B-challenged aims at structural, relevant and feasible improvements in the physical and social environment promoting children's active outdoor play and dietary behaviours. B-challenged will impact all key actors in the selected neighbourhoods and far beyond through disseminating protocols and recommendations (research and policy) for upscaling the B-challenged approach.

Interventions

• Other Physical and social environmental interventions.
  To be determined in the co-creation groups at the five sites (Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands)

Primary outcome measures

• Time spent in outdoor play [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation).]

Secondary outcome measures (8)

• Frequency of fruit consumption during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of vegetable consumption during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of sweets during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of crisps and other salty snacks during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of coke or other soft drinks that contain sugar during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of fast-food (pizza, kebab, burgers) during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of energy drinks (such as Red Bull) during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]
• Frequency of consumption of water during outdoor play, assessed by: [Time frame: Baseline and 12 months follow up (i.e., after intervention implementation)]

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion criteria child co-researchers:

• Living in a underserved urban neighbourhood
• Aged 9-12 years

Inclusion criteria children participating in the effect evaluation:

• Living in the same underserved neighbourhood as the child co-researchers
• Aged 6-12 years

Inclusion criteria adult actors:

• Based on results of the actor mapping (including adult actors interview 1 and adult actors recruitment form)

Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.

Healthy volunteers: Yes

Study design

Allocation

N/A

Model

Single group

Masking

Open label

Primary purpose

Prevention

Study locations

Denmark · 1 center

• University of Southern Denmark — Odense

Germany · 1 center

• University of Bremen, Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology — Bremen

Netherlands · 1 center

• Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc — Amsterdam

Poland · 1 center

• Institute of Mother and Child — Warsaw

Spain · 1 center

• Fundación Instituto Investigación Sanitaria Aragón — Zaragoza

Publications

• Altenburg TM, Pawlowski CS, Ahrens W, Brand T, Buck C, Bornhorst C, Dzielska A, Klaufus L, De Miguel-Etayo P, Moreno L, Okulicz-Kozaryn K, Vrijkotte TGM, Wink R, Belmon LS, Chinapaw MJM. Promoting active outdoor play and healthy dietary behaviours through the co-creation of supporting physical and social environments for and with primary school-aged children living in underserved neighbourhoods in PMID 41791787

Identifiers

NCT: NCT07136376 · "HEALTHEQUITY-039 B-challenged

Primary sources (government registries)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (US NIH)

View this study on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗