Objective: African Americans in the USA experience a disproportionate burden of chronic disease. Healthy lifestyle promotion programmes can help decrease this disease risk. This study determined the feasibility of using dyadic peer support to augment an existing healthy lifestyle programme in African American churches.
Design: A prospective pre-post design was used with 80 participants from three churches in the southeastern USA over an 18-week period.
Methods: Participants attended 9 weeks of group nutrition classes followed by 9 weeks of a dyadic peer support programme. Feasibility was measured by recruitment, acceptability, ability to collect peer support data, ability to implement the peer support component and preliminary health outcomes. Descriptive statistics and multilevel models were used to analyse the data.
Results: Seventy-eight percent of participants completed group classes and peer support activities. Over 95% of participants would work with a partner again. Lay leaders and educators felt they had the resources and participant support to implement a dyadic peer support intervention. Participants achieved small but significant average increases of 1.1 fruit servings per day (p = .001) and 1.2 days of physical activity per week (p = .01) post-intervention. Significant changes in weight (-2.6 pounds, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -4.18, -1.1; p = .001) and vegetable intake (0.681 servings, 95% CI = 0.122, 1.241; p = .017) achieved during the first 9 weeks of the programme were maintained during the second 9 weeks.
Conclusion: Dyadic peer support can successfully be used to augment existing healthy lifestyle promotion programmes within African American churches. Studies using control groups are needed to test the effectiveness of dyadic peer support on health outcomes more rigorously.
Background: The 2018 legalisation of cannabis in Canada sparked concern and conversation about the potential negative impacts of youth cannabis use. It is clear that young people are already engaging in cannabis use for a variety of reasons; therefore, youth cannabis education is desirable to promote harm reduction and reduce the risk of adverse physical and mental health outcomes.
Objective: To identify and categorise Canadian cannabis education resources using a social-ecological approach informed by the youth health literacy framework, considering multiple factors at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels that influence health literacy and impact behaviour.
Methods: In line with scoping review methodology, database searches and an environmental scan of materials were completed. Specific inclusion criteria were identified to encompass all Canadian cannabis education resources directed towards young people aged 9-18 years and adults in contact with youth.
Results: A total of 60 resources were identified and categorised using the youth health literacy framework in terms of their focus on (1) micro influences (resources for youth); (2) meso influences (resources for teachers, parents, mentors); and (3) macro influences (resources for indigenous communities and medical professionals).
Conclusions: While many resources were identified, issues exist with the accessibility, quality and multicultural considerations of such resources, warranting the development of comprehensive, evidence-based and harm reduction-focused cannabis education for youth.