2023 · Review · English
Community capacity for prevention and health promotion: a scoping review on underlying domains and assessment methods
Birgel, V., Decker, L., Röding, D., & Walter, U.
Birgel, V., Decker, L., Röding, D., & Walter, U. (2023). Community capacity for prevention and health promotion: a scoping review on underlying domains and assessment methods. Systematic Reviews, 12(1), Article 147. doi.org/10.1186/s13643-023-02314-1
Summary
Scoping review in Systematic Reviews from the Hannover Medical School group that evaluates CTC in Germany, mapping how ‘community capacity’ – the characteristics that let a community identify and act on health and social problems – has been assessed. The authors searched PubMed, Web of Science and ScienceDirect for English-language studies from 1990 to 2022 that described their capacity assessment explicitly and met at least two of three criteria: a theoretical basis, a participatory approach or a field test. From 4,779 records, 38 studies were included (19 mixed-methods, 11 qualitative, 8 quantitative). The domains in use were consolidated into nine: participation, knowledge and skills, resources, leadership, community power, sense of community, collaboration, critical awareness and problem-solving, and community structure, with four sub-domains (commitment, communication, shared values and goals, sustainability). The review supplies the conceptual grid for the group’s later key-informant measure of capacity, useful for CTC coalitions asking which local conditions they should be building.