Community-based Interventions and Behavioral Outcomes (CIBO) from the Ecolectivos trial

The societal contexts and social environments of the communities play a significant role in shaping individual agency and behaviors, including self-efficacy, household decision-making, social connectedness, and community engagement. While prior research has primarily examined interventions targeting individuals, the influence of community-level interventions on these outcomes remains unexplored. The purpose of this F31 fellowship, entitled “Community-based Interventions and Behavioral Outcomes (CIBO) from the Ecolectivos trial” is to study the effect of the community-level working group intervention and group participation on individual behavioral outcomes. CIBO from the Ecolectivos trial is an ancillary study of ECOLECTIVOS, an implementation research study (R01 ES032009, PI Thompson) that uses a cluster-randomized village-level intervention (12 week working group sessions) to reduce the burning of plastic waste in household fires. Women develop new skills, such as starting a recycling program or making handicrafts from recycled plastic. Four hundred women in 16 villages will be recruited, with 200 from the 8 intervention villages invited to attend the working groups. The CIBO study proposes to evaluate self-efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization (before randomization) and 4 months later (after the working groups are concluded) among Ecolectivos participants. The specific aims for CIBO are: (1) To examine the intervention effect on self-efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization within individuals over time and between the intervention and control groups over time (baseline vs.4 months); (2) To study the effect of sociodemographic factors like age, socioeconomic status, and household size on self- efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization among both study groups using multi-level modelling to account for individual and community level factors; and (Exploratory Aim) To conduct a per-protocol analysis to explore if higher participation in ECOLECTIVOS working groups, among the participants of intervention group, shows a dose-response function in increasing household decision making, self-efficacy, social capital, and community mobilization. Findings from this study will contribute to the scientific evidence on the effects of community-level interventions on individual agency and behavioral outcomes in low-resource community settings like Guatemala.