Abstract
BackgroundFew researchers have the data required to adequately understand how the school environment impacts youth health behaviour development over time.Methods/DesignCOMPASS is a prospective cohort study designed to annually collect hierarchical longitudinal data from a sample of 90 secondary schools and the 50,000+ grade 9 to 12 students attending those schools. COMPASS uses a rigorous quasi-experimental design to evaluate how changes in school programs, policies, and/or built environment (BE) characteristics are related to changes in multiple youth health behaviours and outcomes over time. These data will allow for the quasi-experimental evaluation of natural experiments that will occur within schools over the course of COMPASS, providing a means for generating “practice based evidence” in school-based prevention programming.DiscussionCOMPASS is the first study with the infrastructure to robustly evaluate the impact that changes in multiple school-level programs, policies, and BE characteristics within or surrounding a school might have on multiple youth health behaviours or outcomes over time. COMPASS will provide valuable new insight for planning, tailoring and targeting of school-based prevention initiatives where they are most likely to have impact.
Highlights
Few researchers have the data required to adequately understand how the school environment impacts youth health behaviour development over time
COMPASS is the first study with the infrastructure to robustly evaluate the impact that changes in multiple school-level programs, policies, and built environment (BE) characteristics within or surrounding a school might have on multiple youth health behaviours or outcomes over time
In order to help foster health promoting schools to develop stronger links and engagement with participating schools, and track knowledge use as it unfolds from inception through decision-making, adoption, adaption and implementation in participating schools, the COMPASS study developed the COMPASS School Health Profile (SHP) and connects participating schools with a COMPASS knowledge broker
Summary
Health-promoting schools are empowered to take responsibility for promoting the health of their student population according to their needs and priorities, rather than always having to be reactive to outside regulatory bodies [43]. As described previously [45], the benefit to this type of hierarchical multi-year data is that the data can be used as either a series of cross-sectional samples at the studentand school-level or as a longitudinal sample with repeated measures at both the student- and school-levels These data allow for the quasi-experimental evaluation of natural experiments that will occur within schools over the course of COMPASS, providing a means for generating “practice based evidence” in school-based prevention programming [19]. Determining the school-level characteristics that are related to the development of multiple modifiable youth health behaviours and outcomes will provide valuable insight for informing the future development, tailoring, and targeting of school-based prevention initiatives to where they are most likely to have an impact [46], and will provide the opportunity to understand how the school environment can either promote or inhibit health inequities among subpopulations of at-risk youth Such insight could save valuable and limited prevention/promotion resources.
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