Establishing Internationally Accepted Conceptual and Operational Definitions of Social Prescribing Through Expert Consensus: A Delphi Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Introduction With the social prescribing movement gaining traction globally, there is a need for an agreed definition of social prescribing. There are two types of definitions – conceptual and operational, meaning agreement on both types of definitions is needed. Objective The aim of this study was to establish internationally accepted conceptual and operational definitions of social prescribing. Design A three-round Delphi study was conducted. Methods Consensus was defined a priori as ≥80% agreement. In Round 1, participants were asked to list key elements that are essential to the conceptual definition of social prescribing and to provide corresponding statements that operationalize each of the key elements. In Round 2, participants were asked to rate their agreement with items from the first round for inclusion in the conceptual and/or operational definitions of social prescribing. Based on the findings from this round, the conceptual and operational definitions of social prescribing were developed, including long and short versions of the conceptual definition. In Round 3, participants were asked to rate their agreement with the conceptual and operational definitions of social prescribing. Participants This study involved an international, multidisciplinary panel of experts. The expert panel (n=48) represented 26 different countries across five continents, numerous expert groups, and a variety of years of experience with social prescribing, with the average being 5 years (range = 1-20 years). Results After three rounds, internationally accepted conceptual and operational definitions of social prescribing were established. The definitions were transformed into the Common Understanding of Social Prescribing (CUSP) conceptual framework. Conclusion This foundational work offers a common thread – a shared sense of what social prescribing is, which may be woven into social prescribing research, policy, and practice to foster common understanding of this concept. STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY Strengths of this study include the consensus method that was chosen, the diversity and size of the expert panel, and the fact that consensus was defined a priori as ≥80% agreement Limitations of this study include the fact that only those who could speak, read, and write English were eligible to participate in this study, the attrition of the expert panel, and the fact that the expert panel did not reach 100% agreement on the definitions
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".