Community Engaged Research Strategies Used in Food Retail Interventions: A Scoping Review

Researchers across the United States often leverage community engagement (CE) as a strategy in interventions aiming to alter the retail food environment (RFE), especially in areas serving racially segregated neighborhoods with low incomes. However, little is known about the full breadth, intensity, and approaches used to engage communities in RFE intervention work.

The purpose of this scoping review is to identify what CE research approaches have been applied by researchers in the RFE intervention literature and how they vary by type of retail settings, phase of intervention, year of intervention, and key domains of equity.

Following the JBI (formerly known as Joanna Briggs Institute) and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) extension for Scoping Review guidelines, any study published in academic journals and English that discussed activities or strategies for CE in RFEs, irrespective of the type of study, was included. PubMed, CINAHL, and ProQuest were searched for reports published from inception until August 2023. CE research strategies were extracted and classified following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continuum of community engagement framework, including outreach (lowest CE), consult/involve, collaboration, and shared leadership (highest CE). CE research strategies were then examined for their variation across RFE setting, intervention phase, intervention year, and key equity domains related to healthy food retail (eg, affordability).

A total of 98 RFE interventions reported in 104 reports were included in this review, and most were implemented in either supermarkets (21%), corner stores (20%), or multiple RFE settings (21%). All interventions employed CE research strategies of outreach (n = 98), whereas approximately half employed strategies of shared leadership (n = 52). Exploring CE research strategies by RFE settings and intervention phase, this review found stronger forms of CE in less traditional RFE settings, including mobile markets, and among interventions that used CE research strategies across all phases of the intervention study. RFE interventions that implemented the highest forms of CE research strategies (ie, shared leadership) were also those that addressed all key equity domains.

The findings of this review reveal that the form of CE in RFE interventions varied widely, with more domains of equity addressed when higher forms of CE were used. Insights from this review suggest that future research should prioritize assessing the effectiveness of shared leadership CE strategies on achieving and sustaining nutrition-related health equity outcomes for communities.