(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article from the December 2012 Issue of Public Health Nutrition reports that the quality of lunches brought to school from home were of poorer quality then those provided at school. The authors are reporting on lunches of Grade 5-6 students in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The authors note that " Foods purchased at school were higher in nutrient density for ten micronutrients (Ca, Mg, K, Zn, vitamin A, vitamin D, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12) compared with packed lunch foods from home, which were higher in three micronutrients (Fe, vitamin C and folate). School lunches provided sufficient protein but were higher in sugar and fat than home lunches. Foods brought from home were higher in carbohydrates, fibre and Na than foods purchased at school. The overall nutritional quality of lunches was poor, regardless of source. A significant proportion of foods consumed by the students came from home sources; these were lower nutritional quality and were higher in Na than foods offered at school. Findings suggest that improving the dietary habits of school-aged children will require a collaborative effort from multiple stakeholders, including parents" Read more.
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(An item from ISHN Member information service) Our long-standing discussion of school connectedness continues with our noting of an article on school bonding in the December 2012 issue of the Australian Educational & Developmental Psychologist. School factors were not reported as significant in abstract of the study. The authors report that" This study sought to identify longitudinal influences on school bonding, examining the role of both individual and contextual factors over childhood and early adolescence. We draw on data from 1,308 participants (51% female) in the Australian Temperament Project, a large representative Australian sample that has followed the psychosocial development of participants from infancy to adulthood, and thus provides a rare opportunity to address this gap in the literature. Path analysis was conducted to examine individual and contextual predictors of school bonding at 15–16 years. The individual characteristics of higher academic achievement and sociability, and lower hyperactivity predicted school bonding. Contextual factors also made a significant contribution, including the parent–child relationships and maternal education. The results indicate that both individual and contextual factors make unique contributions to school bonding in adolescence, suggesting a number of potential targets for intervention. Read More.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) Several articles in Issue #6, 2012 of Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology discuss how various mental health illnesses and problems can interact with risk and anti-social behaviours. Anxiety & depression are linked with oppositional defiance in one article and delinquency in another. Sexual risk-taking is linked with mental health problems in two other articles in the same issue. In another article parental bereavement was linked with lower competence in work, peer relations, career planning, and educational aspirations, primarily mediated by the impact of bereavement on child and parental functioning and on family climate. Read more
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2012 of Youth & Society suggests that school characteristics have little impact on youth smoking but tracking or streamiong by academic levels within schools may have an impact. The authors suggest that " Using the 2007 Dutch National School Survey on Substance Use, we find that individual student characteristics are more important predictors than school characteristics. Importantly, social background effects are clearly mediated by school tracks, suggesting that tracking helps us to explain social gradients in substance use. However, school context plays almost no role in adolescent smoking behavior. One exception concerns students in the general track, for whom we find that smoking is further reduced when they are placed in the same school organization as students of the vocational track. This is in line with the theory that tracking differences are magnified in a context where interaction between students from different tracks is promoted. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in the December 2012 Issue of the Journal of Youth & Adolescence reports that different forms of religiosity will positively affect youth behaviours in regards to substance use, violence and delinquency. The researchers report that " Results revealed a five class solution. Classes were identified as religiously disengaged (10.76 %), religiously infrequent (23.59 %), privately religious (6.55 %), religious regulars (40.85 %), and religiously devoted (18.25 %). Membership in the religiously devoted class was associated with the decreased likelihood of participation in a variety of substance use behaviors as well as decreases in the likelihood of fighting and theft. To a lesser extent, membership in the religious regulars class was also associated with the decreased likelihood of substance use and fighting. However, membership in the religiously infrequent and privately religious classes was only associated with the decreased likelihood of marijuana use. Findings suggest that private religiosity alone does not serve to buffer youth effectively against involvement in problem behavior, but rather that it is the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic adolescent religiosity factors that is associated with participation in fewer problem behaviors." Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) A systematic review reported in the December 2012 Issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health reports that ten studies out of 142 studies of new digital media interventions were of sufficient quality to be included (which says something already). The authors report that "Eight described Web-based interventions, one used mobile phones, and one was conducted on an SNS. Two studies significantly delayed initiation of sex, and one was successful in encouraging users of an SNS to remove sex references from their public profile. Seven interventions significantly influenced psychosocial outcomes such as condom self-efficacy and abstinence attitudes, but at times the results were in directions unexpected by the study authors. Six studies increased knowledge of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, or pregnancy. This area of research is emerging and rapidly changing. More data from controlled studies with longer (>1 year) follow-up and measurement of behavioral outcomes will provide a more robust evidence base." Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) The issue of transient or homeless families is part of a series of topics addressed in our ISHN International Discussion Group on Equity, Disadvantage & Disparities. Several articles in Issue #9, 2012 of the Educational Researcher examine the challenges facing these students and families. The introductory article summaries the risks and potential ways to promote resilience among these students. Other articles examine the impact of transience on the children's exucutiive functioning and reading skills. Two other articles focus on the long-term effects on development and educational achievement. The closing commentary calls for greater clarity in our shared terminology, underlying concepts and measurement. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) The growing educational, social and health consequences of boys being systematically excluded and restrained in school systems in many high income countries has largely been ignored by most researchers. An article in Issue #4, 2012 of Irish Educational Studies adds a little bit of light to this issue as it examines the ownership and contestation associated with the introduction of the Exploring Masculinities program in England. The authors suggest that " The programme was developed in the late 1990s to meet the social and personal needs of young men. As its dissemination was being planned, it became the subject of critical attention from some high-profile journalists and certain parent bodies. This article reports on a follow-up study of a national sample of parents regarding the inclusion of EM issues on the school curriculum. It also draws on interviews with journalists who were at the centre of the related media debate. The macro curriculum issues are discussed in light of this data along with one key issue identified by parents, namely the professional competence of teachers around social and personal issues." Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #8, 2012 of Teaching & Teacher Education reports on how pre-service teachers are induced to copy the beliefs and practices of their cooperating teachers. This small scale study "employed ethnographic methods to describe and explain changes to beginning science teachers' (n = 6) practices and beliefs during a year long internship. Teaching practices were strongly influenced by the cooperating teachers. Initially, all six interns attempted to re-enact lessons they witnessed their cooperating teachers teach, including following lesson structures and borrowing representations, anecdotes, and jokes. Later, they independently implemented instruction that emphasized similar strategies as their mentors, regardless of whether or not they were experiencing success. Interns who were successful also shifted their beliefs to match their mentors." The implications of this in regards to the teaching of values, skills and intentions in subjects such as health and personal/social development are significant. Read more.
(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in the December 2012 Issue of Social Science & Medicine suggests that realist perspectives should be integrated within random controlled trials in order to better understand the complexity of interventions and how their components and their characteristics interact with the local context. The authors suggest that `Randomized trials of complex public health interventions generally aim to identify what works, accrediting specific intervention ‘products’ as effective. This approach often fails to give sufficient consideration to how intervention components interact with each other and with local context. ‘Realists’ argue that trials misunderstand the scientific method, offer only a ‘successionist’ approach to causation, which brackets out the complexity of social causation, and fail to ask which interventions work, for whom and under what circumstances. We counter-argue that trials are useful in evaluating social interventions because randomized control groups actually take proper account of rather than bracket out the complexity of social causation. Nonetheless, realists are right to stress understanding of ‘what works, for whom and under what circumstances’ and to argue for the importance of theorizing and empirically examining underlying mechanisms.`The authors also propose that ‘realist’ trials should aim to: examine the effects of intervention components separately and in combination, explore mechanisms of change, analysing how pathway variables mediate intervention effects; use multiple trials across contexts; draw on qualitative & quantitative data; and be oriented towards building theories setting out how interventions interact with context. This last suggestion resonates with recent suggestions that, in delivering truly ‘complex’ interventions, fidelity is important not so much in terms of precise activities but, rather, key intervention ‘processes’ and ‘functions’. Read more
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