CO-CREATE - Confronting obesity: Co-creating policy with youth

The project "Confronting obesity: Co-creating policy with youth" (CO-CREATE) aims to reduce childhood obesity and its co-morbidities by working with adolescents, to create, inform and disseminate obesity-preventive evidence-based policies. The project has applied a systems approach to provide a better understanding of how factors associated with obesity interact at various levels. The project has focussed on adolescence as the specific target group, a crucial age with increasing autonomy and the next generation of adults, parents and policymakers, and thus important agents for change. CO-CREATE has involved and empowered adolescents and youth organizations in England, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Portugal to foster a participatory process of identifying and formulating relevant policies, deliberating such options with other private and public actors, promoting relevant policy agenda and tools and strategies for implementation. The youth involvement has taken place through establishing youth alliances that have developed policy suggestions to prevent adolescent obesity, which the youth later have presented and discussed with relevante policy stakeholders. The adolescents participated responded to a questionnaire prior to commencing the alliances as a baseline survey. Then continued to respond monthly to the same questionnaire for the time period the alliances were active. Additionally a post-intervention follow-up survey was undertaken about 6 months after the last alliance meeting. The survey questionnaire measured readiness for action and attitudes towards policy measures to combat childhood and adolescent obesity. To identify any difference between the alliance participants' readiness and attitudes throughout the intervention period, a control group was established in each country.

The open access dataset includes responses to the baseline survey from adolescents participating in the CO-CREATE project in England, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Portugal either as member of the youth alliances or being part of the control group. The COVID-pandemic introduced a new scenario in the very beginning of the alliance gathering, enforcing them to go online, which implied a severe drop out of participants. The follow-up surveys received few responses, compromising anonymity within the participation groups, as well as the relevance of the data to perform statistical analyses. The follow-up surveys are therefore not included in the datafile. Instead the baseline data from the alliances and the control groups are merged into a joint file, constituting a larger sample to study adolescents' readiness for action and attitudes towards policy measures to combat childhood and adolescent obesity across England, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Portugal, and thereby securing the anonymity of the participants.