The Office of Disease Prevention and participating ICOs are issuing this Notice to highlight our interest in encouraging highly innovative and promising translational research to improve our understanding of how to increase and maintain health-enhancing physical activity using multi-level interventions in a wide range of population groups across the lifespan (e.g., including racial and ethnic minorities, children, older adults, persons with medical/behavioral health conditions, and persons with disabilities). This includes efficacy, effectiveness and dissemination and implementation studies. It also includes support for pilot, exploratory, or developmental work in preparation for full-scale, fully powered efficacy studies, preliminary feasibility studies, as well as expanded feasibility work for a discrete, specified, circumscribed project that is based on well-established theory, existing data and evidence-based interventions.

This Notice encourages translational research aimed at developing or testing multi-level physical activity interventions to improve health and well-being. For the purpose of this NOSI, multi-level is defined as having an effect on at least two levels of influence. At minimum, the proposed study must:

1. include physical activity as one of the primary outcomes,
2. inform development of or test an intervention or program that acts on at least two socioecological domains or levels; and
3. demonstrate high potential for scalability and sustainability.

For example, an intervention might focus on incorporating components of a healthy diet in combination with increasing physical activity at a school or workplace. Likewise, an intervention might include technology-based challenges at the interpersonal level, as well as the initiation/strengthening of joint-use agreements for community members to use recreation facilities at the public policy level. A different intervention might focus on methods for enhancing motivation at the intrapersonal level and creating online social support groups for physical activity at the interpersonal level. Policy or built environmental intervention across worksites at an organizational level may be paired with individually targeted intervention components to promote physical activity. Studies proposing to address multi-level interventions can include experimental designs or natural experiments created by changes in policy. Intervention settings can include, but are not limited to, healthcare settings, worksites, households, schools, green space, parks and recreation centers, other community organizations and settings, or entire communities.

This notice applies to due dates on or after June 5, 2021 and subsequent receipt dates through February 16, 2024. 

NOT-OD-21-087