Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this research brief is to report on the impact of Harvest of the Month (HOM) for Early Care and Education (ECE) at home to better understand parent perspectives and influences on children's nutrition behavior. Harvest of the Month (HOM) is a farm to school programming strategy that features a locally grown food in at least one nutrition and agriculture lesson, taste test activity, and a snack or meal recipe each month. This exploratory study used a survey research design to gather parent perspectives during pilot implementation of HOM for ECE during the 2017 – 2018 school year. The survey was delivered electronically. Twenty-one parents from a campus-based preschool program in the northwest United States reported procurement and consumption of HOM foods at home. Findings suggest that a variety of HOM foods are being served and consumed at home. Parents in this study placed more importance on knowing where food comes from rather than serving local foods. Further, parents' knowledge of farm to ECE, reported food purchasing at farmer's markets, and participation in community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs were limited, suggesting a need for continued targeted parent education that could have a positive effect of families' healthy eating.

Formative evaluation was conducted for the Personal Health Behaviors Overview (PHBO) survey to evaluate nutrition behaviors with image-based questions in low-income populations. Forty-nine low-income adults from nutrition education classes were invited to participate with n = 42 included in the analysis. Participants completed the PHBO survey while an interviewer recorded observations. Upon completion, participants were asked questions regarding each PHBO survey item. Most participants completed the survey in an average of 4 minutes. The majority said the photographs of food made it easier to answer questions. Less than half indicated that the visuals depicting frequency made questions easier. While participant responses were aligned with the aims of the PHBO question being asked, some suggestions were offered for improvements of photographs. While this formative evaluation research indicates additional validation is necessary before use of these PHBO questions, the image-based simple question technique is a possible solution for efficient and effective nutrition assessments in low-income, limited literacy populations.

Kinship care is the increasingly preferred child placement with a relative when the biological parents are unable to provide care. Program and resource supports must understand how to best meet these caregivers' needs. Through thematic analysis of existing literature, this study aims to understand how kin caregiver characteristics affect kinship care outcomes. A total of 28 peer-reviewed articles were included in this analysis. Findings indicate that caregiver characteristics, including racial differences, family roles, economic burden, structural supports, and caregiver health, have potentially differential impacts on kinship care and outcomes. Identifying influential caregiver characteristics highlights the importance of adapting policy, programming, and research to support diverse kinship families, rather than viewing them as homogeneous. Incorporation of these characteristic considerations may lead to more effective and impactful supports and improved well-being for all kinship families.

Scholarship has highlighted the importance of kin relations for well-being in adulthood. Much focus has been on relationships between spouses and between parents and children. However, limited research has explored the role of adult sibling relationships in well-being, and no studies have made direct comparisons among the effects of tension with these multiple family members. Using data collected from 495 adult children nested within 254 families, we examined the differential impact of tension with mothers, siblings, and spouses on depressive symptoms in midlife. Separate multi-level regression analyses showed that tension with spouses, mothers, and siblings each predicted depressive symptoms. Combined analyses revealed that greater tension with spouses was associated with higher depressive symptoms, but tension with mothers and siblings was not. However, Wald tests comparing the strength of these associations between tension and depressive symptoms indicated that these associations did not significantly vary across family members. Interactions with gender indicated that tension with mothers was more strongly associated with higher depressive symptoms for women than men. These findings highlight the importance of the quality of relationships with family members on individuals' psychological well-being, and call for researchers to consider multiple ties and gender when examining family relationships and well-being.

Are Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) connecting families? And what does this mean in terms of family routines, relationships, norms, work, intimacy and privacy? This edited collection takes a life course and generational perspective covering theory, including posthumanism and strong structuration theory, and methodology, including digital and cross-disciplinary methods. It presents a series of case studies on topics such as intergenerational connections, work-life balance, transnational families, digital storytelling and mobile parenting. It will give students, researchers and practitioners a variety of tools to make sense of how ICTs are used, appropriated and domesticated in family life. These tools allow for an informed and critical understanding of ICTs and family dynamics