Developing Group Model-Building Workshops for Children's Healthy Living Food Systems

Abstract

This article reports on the development of group model-building workshops for understanding children's nutrition and health as a complex adaptive system. A community-based system dynamics approach was used to conduct workshops in 5 United States-Affiliated Pacific jurisdictions as part of the Children's Healthy Living Food Systems project from October 2022 to March 2023. Workshops were cofacilitated by local teams using a facilitation guide with a series of structured small-group exercises or "scripts" and evaluated using a pre-post participant survey. Products generated through these workshops included causal maps of the food systems driving child nutrition and health and prioritized action ideas that can be used to inform program design, planning, and implementation of local initiatives. Workshop evaluation highlights the robustness of workshops across jurisdictions, cultural contexts, and varied experiences of facilitation teams. Implications for the future development of group model-building facilitation guides and child nutrition are discussed.

Keywords: child diet; community-based system dynamics; food systems; group model building; nutrition.

FIGURE 1

Causal map from American Samoa group model-building workshop model review. Blue variables were identified as key variables during the workshop, where font size represents importance. The pink arrows are causal links. Polarity (+/−) signifies the direction of behavior change, where positive implies the variables change in the same direction and negative implies the variables change in the opposite direction. A time delay is indicated by parallel slashes on a black dotted link.