Classroom, club or collective? Three types of community-based group intervention and why they matter for health

摘要: Interventions involving groups of laywomen, men and adolescents to promote health are increasingly popular, but past research has rarely distinguished between different types intervention with groups. We introduce a simple typology that distinguishes three ideal types: classrooms, clubs collectives. Classrooms treat as platform for reaching population didactic behaviour change strategies. Clubs seek build, strengthen leverage relationships group members health. Collectives engage whole communities in assuming ownership over problem taking action address it. argue this distinction goes long way towards explaining differences achievable outcomes using interventions First, classrooms appropriate when policymakers primarily care about improving the members, collectives better placed achieve population-level impact. Second, classroom implicitly assume bottleneck behaviours preventing outcome from being achieved can be reliably identified by experts, whereas make use local knowledge, skill creativity tackle complexity. Third, individual participants issues largely on their own, while required engender collective support invite public researchers our framework align own communities’ ambitions group-based test implement context. caution is meant apply laypeople rather than professionalised such civil society organisations.