Building healthy schools through technology-enabled citizen science: The case of the our voice participatory action model in schools from Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT

The physical and social environment of school settings are important for health promotion among children and adolescents. Efforts to create supportive environments at the school level can benefit from including community engagement and empowerment processes to advocate for health promotion. The Our Voice model presents a unique opportunity for Latin American students to improve their school environments. The objective of this study was to engage and empower students (9–18 years) from five schools in Bogotá, Colombia to use the Our Voice model to assess and seek to improve their local school environments. This study employed Our Voice’s ‘citizen science by the people’ method using a mobile application for data collection. The Our Voice initiative included the following four phases: (1) Design, planning and recruitment; (2) Data collection; (3) Community meetings for thematic analysis, priority setting and initial design of feasible solutions; and (4) Community meetings with decision-makers to advocate for changes. The citizen scientists identified and advocated for safer physical activity-supportive environments and healthier food and drinks availability. This study allowed children and adolescent citizen scientists to make their voices heard by policymakers and empowered them as agents of change in the process of building healthier schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen science
• school
• healthy habits
• environment
• participatory action model

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the schools and citizen scientists for their engagement in this research. We are deeply indebted to Johnattan García, Patricia Vásquez, Lucy Rincón, Etelvina Mahecha, María José Acevedo, Leidy Marcela Urbano, Sofía Heredia, Karen Fajardo, and Paola Martínez for their assistance with study procedures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Colciencias) [grant numbers 726–2016 to S.A.G, M.A.R., C.T.] and partially supported by CRDF Global agreement OISE-20-66868-1, and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant ID#7334 (awarded to A.C.K.).