About CEPHI

Overview

This research project is being led by the EPPI-Centre at University College London with Co-production Collective. It aims to understand how we can make research evidence more useful for local decision-making.

Why are we examining childhood obesity?

We will focus on childhood obesity/overweight, as an example of something which impacts negatively on the health of large numbers of children and young people, but which, despite substantial investments in weight management and obesity prevention interventions, levels have remained broadly similar over recent years. One reason could be that interventions that are unsuitable for local areas are being implemented because there exist few strategies for checking whether an intervention that worked somewhere else will work in a new place.

We are also going to focus on interventions that do/could take place within schools.

What kinds of evidence are we focussing on?

This research project aims to understand how systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be made more useful by understanding whether their findings are generalisable to local contexts.

• Systematic reviews bring together the findings of multiple research studies using systematic and transparent methods.

• Meta-analysis is a method often used in systematic reviews to summarise the results from different studies.

Because reviews and meta-analyses bring together multiple studies, often from different contexts or even different countries, we need to find ways of understanding whether their overall findings are relevant and useful for informing decisions in a local area or a specific country.

Why is systematic review evidence important?

Evidence from systematic reviews and meta-analysis is considered to be the ‘gold standard’ in research about whether health interventions are effective. Health interventions are any kind of service that aims to improve people’s health such as counselling, medication or exercise training. Evidence from systematic reviews and meta-analysis offers a ‘global’ perspective on how well interventions from a wide variety of different settings and contexts perform in practice. However, review and meta-analytic evidence is often not used in decisions about which interventions or services to provide. One reason is that while systematic review evidence offers a broad perspective, people who make decisions about which services to deliver need more information about whether an intervention shown to work in other countries or areas is likely to work in the same way in their local area.

The proposed research will explore ways of making systematic review evidence and the results of meta-analysis more useful for local decision-making.

What we hope to achieve

Our research will develop ways to use local knowledge and data to examine whether review findings are relevant to that area. Firstly, we will speak to a range of stakeholders, including young people, parents and service providers about the factors that drive childhood obesity in a particular area and how they relate to one another. Next, we will identify data about the area and explore how it can be incorporated into our understanding of generalisability. Using the stakeholder views and the local data we will examine the studies included within a meta-analysis and see how their context differs from or is similar to the local area of interest. As these are new techniques, we will speak to people who make decisions about delivering services in local areas to understand whether these new developments will be useful to them and how they can be scaled up further if they are deemed useful.

Registration

This project is registered on the Research Registry - see the details here.

Ethics

This project has been approved by the UCL Institute of Education Research Ethics Committee (REC 1498)