Glossary
Accuracy: Closeness of measured value to a gold standard or known value; it is related to validity.
Anthropometric measures: Measures that provide information on weight, body size, or body composition.
Body mass index: A person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. It can be used to screen for adiposity and related weight categories that may lead to health problems, but it is not diagnostic of the adiposity or health of an individual.
Childhood healthy weight programs: A program designed to teach healthy eating and physical activity for children and adolescents with overweight/obesity and their families.
Childhood obesity: Body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children and teens of the same age and sex.
Childhood overweight: Body mass index at or above the 85th percentile and below the 95th percentile for children and teens of the same age and sex.
Communications: The activities by which you share your program’s objectives, accomplishments, and strategies both internally with staff and leadership and externally with other partners, program participants, media, and the public.
Contextual factors: Factors that have an impact on the community health weight program’s outcomes but are not necessarily part of the intervention. This can be specific to the program itself, to program participants and their families, and even to the communities where participants live.
Cost-related measure: Measures that derive from cost analyses and cost-effectiveness analyses.
Cultural competence: Ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people from cultures or belief systems that are different from one’s own.
Effort-based measures: Measures that assess physical fitness such as heart rate recovery from exercise.
Environmental support: A work climate where program champions can secure resources and gather backing and approval from leadership, partners, and the public.
Evaluability assessments: A methodical process to decide whether a program has the necessary information, engagement from interested parties, and organizational structure to be evaluated successfully.
Evaluation readiness: An organization’s ability to successfully assess how well a program was implemented, how successful that project was, and the determinants of the degree of success or failure.
Feasibility: The degree of being easily done.
Funding stability: An approach to identify and develop consistent funding sources for your program in the long term.
Health equity: Ensuring that everyone has the fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible.
Lifestyle or behavioral change measures: Measures that assess changes in nutrition, physical activity, screen time, and sleep.
Logic model: A tool to help you plan, describe, manage, and evaluate your program.
Organizational capacity: The degree to which you have the internal support, knowledge, experience, and financial and physical resources needed to effectively manage your program.
Organizational readiness: How well an organization is prepared to undertake an evaluation by way of operations, resources, and work culture and attitudes toward evaluation.
Outcome measures: Measures that will show you the impact of your intervention.
Partnerships: Goal-oriented relationships with other organizations, leadership, or membership-based groups that can directly impact program success and sustainability.
Physiological and metabolic measures: Measures that convey information about an individual’s body functions such as blood pressure, lipids, glucose, hemoglobin A1c, as well as effort-based measures such as heart rate recovery from exercise.
Process measures: Measures that focus on different aspects of your program’s delivery and activities such as enrollment, setting, transportation, participation, readiness to change, and mastery of skill.
Program adaptation: The process of using the scientific literature and your evaluation data to program effectiveness and meet the needs of participants and involved parties.
Program evaluation: The on-going process by which the value of a program’s inputs and outputs are examined.
Program sustainability: The ability to continue providing community health services or benefits over time, even after a funding period is over.
Program-based measures: Measures that describe the program such as enrollment, attendance, and program activities.
Propriety: The state of quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals.
Provider-based measures: Measures that help you understand the process that supports your program’s delivery.
Psychosocial measures: Measures that assess the possible impact of the program on domains of psychological and social functioning among children or teens with overweight or obesity.
Remote evaluation: Assessment of a program using the support of technologies such as data downloads, videos, photographs, telephone interviews, and meeting at off-site locations.
Self-esteem: Broadly defined as thoughts, concepts, and feelings about oneself.
Social determinants of health: The conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.
Strategic planning: An organizational or program activity that helps to develop priorities, identify resources, and harmonizes work toward common goals and objectives.
Utility: The state of being useful or beneficial.