Great expectations and hard times

Developing community indicators in a Healthy Communities Initiative in Canada

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22945596
AutoresNeale Smith (0000-0002-3850-9588, University of British Columbia, autor de correspondencia), Lori Baugh Littlejohns (0000-0003-1766-4770, Red Deer College), Penelope Hawe (0000-0003-2397-867X, University of Calgary), L Sutherland (0000-0001-5056-4101)
Año2008
Volumen23
Número2
Páginas119-126
Fecha de publicación2008-01-16
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHealth Promotion International (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0957-4824 • E-ISSN: 1460-2245
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/heapro/dan003
PMID18263884
OpenAlexW2133016288
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas9

This paper reports on expectations for and community members' experience in the development of community indicators in a healthy communities initiative (HCI) in Alberta, Canada. The HCI process involved community visioning, the creation of action plans to further the vision by addressing key health priorities and/or community capacity building activities and the development of indicators to monitor and report on progress towards goals. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with community participants to discuss definitions of success in the HCI and participant experience in developing indicators. Three themes emerged: the formal indicators lacked relevance to community members; the community did not own the HCI indicators and participants instead drew upon measures of success which were largely experiential in nature. The study provides a critically reflective, candid account of on-the-ground work with communities. The findings reveal limitations in the process of developing community indicators in this HCI, which we attribute in part to skills and discontinuities on the staffing side of the health authority and in part to failure to recognize and fully appreciate 'different ways of knowing' between communities and agencies.

Community development · Experiential learning · Medical education · Pedagogy · Political science · Process (computing) · Public relations · Relevance (law) · Staffing · Work (physics) · Community Health and Development · Computer Science · Engineering · Health Policy Implementation Science · Health, psychology, and well-being · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology