Background/Aims:
CHILDHOOD OBESITY
Preventing the development of childhood obesity requires multilevel, multicomponent, comprehensive approaches. Study designs often do not allow for systematic evaluation of the efficacy of individual intervention components before the intervention is fully tested. As such, childhood obesity prevention programs may contain a mix of effective and ineffective components. This article describes the design and rationale of a childhood obesity preventive intervention developed using the multiphase optimization strategy, an engineering-inspired framework for optimizing behavioral interventions. Using a series of randomized experiments, the objective of the study was to systematically test, select, and refine candidate components to build an optimized childhood obesity preventive intervention to be evaluated in a subsequent randomized controlled trial.