Context: Despite the growing emphasis on social marketing as a tool for improving the health of school-aged children, there is little comprehensive understanding of how research is evolving in this field. In the present study we aimed to conduct a co-word analysis to give a systematic account of the trends that describe the role of social marketing in promoting children’s health.
Evidence Acquisition: This study employed a PRISMA-guided systematic review combined with bibliometric and co-word analysis to examine research trends in social marketing interventions targeting school-aged children. Peer-reviewed Englishlanguage articles published between 1985 and 2024 were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and PubMed. After removing duplicates, titles and abstracts were screened according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. This screening was performed independently by two reviewers, with discrepancies resolved through consensus, resulting in 762 articles being included in the final analysis. Keyword normalization and co-word analysis were conducted to identify major research themes and conceptual structures. Bibliometric mapping and visualization of research trends were performed using VOSviewer and the R programming environment.
Results: The results of the co-word analysis showed that the application of social marketing in promoting the health of schoolaged children and adolescents has been organized into seven categories, including “social marketing and behavior change strategies”, “health behaviors and lifestyle”, “health policy and public health”, “health education and promotion”, “social and community factors”, “prevention and risk management”, and “ethics and sustainability”.
Conclusion: Based on the seven thematic categories identified through co-word analysis, the findings demonstrated that research on social marketing interventions for school-aged children is structured around interconnected domains, including behavior change strategies, lifestyle-related health behaviors, public health policy, health education, social and community influences, risk prevention, and ethical and sustainability considerations. Together, these categories highlight the multidimensional and integrative nature of social marketing research in this field. The prominence of themes related to parents, communities, media, and digital platforms further indicates that social marketing interventions increasingly rely on multi-level and socially embedded approaches to support positive health-related behaviors among school-aged children.