The core of this thesis describes the evaluation of the community intervention
"Wijkgezondheidswerk", a community health behavior intervention program to
improve health related behavior in deprived neighborhoods in the city of Eindhoven.
Besides this evaluation study, we were able to investigate other important additional
topics. The baseline data of the evaluation study were used to examine determinants
ofhealth related behavior in deprived neighborhoods and also a systematic review of
the literature was conducted.
The community intervention "Wijkgezondheidswerk" is a joint project with a
number of partners involved in either intervention implementation or intervention
evaluation. The lead agency is the municipal health service of Eindhoven. Other
main partners in Eindhoven are the municipal task force of social development, local
grassroots organizations, and community social work organizations. Main partners
involved in the evaluation component of the project are the Department ofSocial
Sciences of the Wageningen University and the Department of Public Health of the
Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam. The project was evaluated by means
of a community intervention trial and has a quasi-experimental design. Beforehand,
the municipal health services assigned the intervention to two neighborhoods and to
have an evaluation design with concurrent control neighborhoods, three matched comparison neighborhoods* were selected prior to intervention implementation.
A longitudinal sample survey and repeated cross sectional sample surveys were used
to measure changes in ke