Development of a community health inclusion index: an evaluation tool for improving inclusion of people with disabilities in community health initiatives

Details

• Alternative Title:
  BMC Public Health
• Personal Author:
  Eisenberg, Yochai ; Rimmer, James H. ; Mehta, Tapan ; Fox, Michael H.
• Description:
  Background
  
  Community health initiatives often do not provide enough supports for people with disabilities to fully participate in healthy, active living opportunities. The purpose of this study was to design an instrument that focused on integrating disability-related items into a multi-level survey tool that assessed healthy, active living initiatives.
  
  Methods
  
  The development and testing of the Community Health Inclusion Index (CHII) involved four components: (a) literature review of studies that examined barriers and facilitators to healthy, active living; (b) focus groups with persons with disabilities and professionals living in geographically diverse settings; (c) expert panel to establish a final set of critical items; and (d) field testing the CHII in 164 sites across 15 communities in 5 states to assess the instrument’s reliability.
  
  Results
  
  Results from initial analysis of these data indicated that the CHII has good reliability. Depending on the subscale, Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.700 to 0.965. The CHII’s inter-rater agreement showed that 14 of the 15 venues for physical activity or healthy eating throughout a community had strong agreement (0.81 – 1.00), while one venue had substantial agreement (0.61 – 0.80).
  
  Conclusion
  
  The CHII is the first instrument to operationalize community health inclusion into a comprehensive assessment tool that can be used by public health professionals and community coalitions to examine the critical supports needed for improving healthy, active living among people with disabilities.
  
  Electronic supplementary material
  
  The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-015-2381-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
  
  
• Subjects:
  Adolescent Adult Child Community Health Services Disabled Persons Focus Groups Humans Middle Aged Public Facilities Reproducibility Of Results Residence Characteristics Schools Social Participation Surveys And Questionnaires Workplace Young Adult

  More +
• Source:
  BMC Public Health. 15.
• Pubmed ID:
  26462917
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC4603756
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Volume:
  15
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:8a0baf83ca5367789230ab85becabbb242838174ca14dc1d70cacf83eae23f254bba00dd8a9ee3a405709d6bf0127ba7459cca772e8175dd7f44435a3a92bd98
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/35112/cdc_35112_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.59 MB ]