The Student Weight and Obesity Control Plan: Perceived Implementation Challenges from the Executive Perspectives

The Iranian education ministry’s Student Weight and Obesity Control Plan were ordered to schools across the country to follow the document’s instructions of fundamental change and improve student attitudes with a healthy and active lifestyle approach. Despite its many successes, it has been challenging in practice. Thus, this study aims to explain the plan’s challenges from the executives’ perspectives. The present study is a qualitative type with a conventional content analysis approach. The participants were organizers and executives of Tabriz’s Weight and Obesity Control plan, and nineteen individuals were selected as participants via a purposive sampling approach. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed via open and axial coding. Two experts confirmed the validity of coding by revising and controlling the accuracy of the extracted codes and re-coding the interviews. After analyzing the findings, five main themes, i.e., no support from families, student reluctance, executives’ negative attitude, inadequate infrastructure, and poor management and planning, were extracted after analyzing the initial codes, along with 17 corresponding subcategories were identified as the plan challenges. The results indicate that the main problems related to cyberspace education and inaccurate information and unreal of the student, economic poverty of families, lack of specialized workforce, poor coordination between related organs and institutions is the rapid and short-term implementation of the plan. To advance the plan goals, it is suggested that a fundamental review of infrastructure and management problems be adopted to motivate both implementers and students of the project.