ASPO Abstracts
Ciclovía: Progressing from Research Intervention to Community Adoption
Category: Behavioral Science & Health Communication
Conference Year: 2020
Abstract Body:
Purpose: Open street events, where roads are temporarily closed to motorized vehicles,
provide safe space for physical activity and have potential to become sustainable rural
community infrastructure. Since 2017, we have collaborated with a rural community to
implement an open street event, named ciclovía. In 2019, ciclovía was adopted as a
community-wide program. This paper describes the process of progressing ciclovía from
a research intervention to a community-adopted program.
Methods: We used community-based participatory research to foster bidirectional
learning on how to optimize the content and implementation of ciclovía to be feasible and
acceptable for rural communities. The community-academic partnership focused on: 1)
understanding the science of ciclovía, 2) learning the implementation process, 3) creating
tools to facilitate planning, implementation, and evaluation of ciclovía, and 4) developing
transition steps from a research intervention to a community-adopted program.
Results: The progression of the research intervention into community adoption spanned
two years. First, the partnership met quarterly to discuss the science of ciclovía, its utility,
and adaptation for rural communities. Second, the partnership studied processes that
facilitated ciclovía implementation. Third, the partnership created the ciclovía planning
guide and tools for communities to use to implement their own ciclovía. The guide
included forming the planning committee, setting meeting and communication plans,
marketing and promotion, and selecting evaluation tools. Fourth, the transition steps from
research to community adoption included creating roles and responsibilities,
implementing ciclovía using the planning guide, and convening listening sessions for
improvement on implementation. Community attendance at ciclovía doubled from 189
individuals (126 children and 63 adults) when it was a research intervention to 394
individuals (277 children and 117 adults) when it was a community program.
Conclusion: The progression from a research intervention to a community-adopted
program encompasses multiple steps that involve bidirectional learning and partnership
with the community. Lessons learned from this study are integrated into a disseminable
ciclovía planning guide.
Keywords: Community-based participatory research, PA, Ciclovía, Community adoption