Engaging stakeholder communities as body image intervention partners: The Body Project as a case example

Abstract

Despite recent advances in developing evidence-based psychological interventions, substantial changes are needed in the current system of intervention delivery to impact mental health on a global scale (Kazdin & Blase, 2011). Prevention offers one avenue for reaching large populations because prevention interventions often are amenable to scaling-up strategies, such as task-shifting to lay providers, which further facilitate community stakeholder partnerships. This paper discusses the dissemination and implementation of the Body Project, an evidence-based body image prevention program, across 6 diverse stakeholder partnerships that span academic, non-profit and business sectors at national and international levels. The paper details key elements of the Body Project that facilitated partnership development, dissemination and implementation, including use of community-based participatory research methods and a blended train-the-trainer and task-shifting approach. We observed consistent themes across partnerships, including: sharing decision making with community partners, engaging of community leaders as gatekeepers, emphasizing strengths of community partners, working within the community’s structure, optimizing non-traditional and/or private financial resources, placing value on cost-effectiveness and sustainability, marketing the program, and supporting flexibility and creativity in developing strategies for evolution within the community and in research. Ideally, lessons learned with the Body Project can be generalized to implementation of other body image and eating disorder prevention programs.

Weight Shame, Social Connection, and Depressive Symptoms in Late Adolescence

“…These findings suggest the benefits of engaging new non-food and non-exercise based interventions at the times students first arrive on campus that could help adolescents manage weight. From a practical perspective, it suggests that widely applied campus-based efforts to encourage positive body image (such as Body Project [ 58 ]) that are most often concerned with preventing eating disorders, might also be able to buffer new students’ risk of both weight gain and depression as well. In addition, importantly, this study shows that men students are also vulnerable to the enculturated effects of body shame on depressive symptom risk while new to campus, so interventions should target both genders.…”

Designing and implementing a positive body image program: Unchartered territory with a diverse team of participants

“…Shea et al (2011) explored how Indigenous girls defined healthy bodies and body image using photovoice. Becker et al (2017) disseminated and implemented a body image prevention program across six stakeholder groups using community-based participatory research.…”

Innovation in eating disorders research and practice: Expanding our community and perspectives at the 2018 International Conference on Eating Disorders: Editorial to accompany IJED Virtual Issue in honor of the 2018 International Conference on Eating Disorders.

“…Becker, Perez et al . () also provide an example of CBPR in this issue, in which they partnered with a local foodbank organization to investigate the relationship between food insecurity and eating pathology among adults seeking food from food pantries.…”