Health Education Research Advance Access published online on June 16, 2008
Health Education Research, doi:10.1093/her/cyn029
Process evaluation results from a school- and community-linked intervention: the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG)
1 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
2 Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
3 Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA
4 Division of Prevention and Population Sciences, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA
5 William Brice College of Nursing, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
6 Division of Epidemiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55454, USA
7 Department of Community Health Sciences, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
8 Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
9 Department of Foods and Nutrition, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
10 Center for Behavior and Community Health Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA
Correspondence to: * Correspondence to: D. R. Young. E-mail: dryoung{at}umd.edu
Process evaluation is a component of intervention research that evaluates whether interventions are delivered and received as intended. Here, we describe the process evaluation results for the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG) intervention. The intervention consisted of four synergistic components designed to provide supportive school- and community-linked environments to prevent the decline in physical activity in adolescent girls. Process evaluation results indicate that the intervention components were delivered from intervention staff to teachers with high fidelity (84–97%) to the protocol and with lower fidelity (range: 18–93%) from teachers to students. Physical activity programs for girls, a unique feature of the TAAG intervention, increased from a mean of 10 programs per school to a mean of 16 and 15 in years 1 and 2, respectively, in intervention schools, with no change in control schools. These findings suggest that a multicomponent school- and community-based physical activity intervention can be delivered with fidelity and result in a middle school environment that supports physical activity for girls.
Received on August 18, 2007; accepted on April 29, 2008