Design-Based Research on Active Family Involvement: Developing a Family Toolbox to Support Health Care Professionals Working with Diabetes Management

Family involvement is a complex matter, often characterized by unclear structural relations and contrasting needs and expectations within the family. In most es, the family is where health behaviours are developed, maintained and changed, and incorporating a genuinely participatory health promotion approach into chronic disease prevention and care has the potential to significantly improve health promotion practice. In this chapter, we provide an exemplary e of a family-based health promotion research project in which achieving the highest level of user involvement in every stage of the research and development process was of central concern. This was complicated because the various stages (needs assessment, ideation, prototyping, feasibility testing and implementation) were very different and the two target groups (healthcare professionals and families living with type 2 diabetes) had different motivations and goals. The research project was based on a comprehensive, integrated health promotion approach that included a set of five evidence-based principles. The project and the developed Family Toolbox intervention have been instrumental in the ongoing development of the principled health promotion approach.