The intervention level framework: using systems thinking to address the complexity of childhood obesity prevention

Childhood obesity has generated a considerable response from policymakers in Canada and abroad, resulting in the production of numerous strategies containing recommendations for action. This abundance of proposed activity can be overwhelming for public health practitioners seeking to best invest resources. Complexity science has been proposed as a means to assist public health in moving forward on this issue. The Chronic Disease Systems Modeling Lab at SFU has developed the 5 level Intervention Level Framework (ILF), based on the work of Donella Meadows, as a means of sorting and analyzing recommendations to address complex health problems from a complex systems perspective. In this study the ILF is applied to a sub-set of childhood obesity recommendations in order to assess its strengths and weaknesses for a broader analysis. Finessing the ILF will contribute to the field of systems based methodological inquiry and will further the study of complex public health problems.