Progress 03/19/14 to 02/28/19
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project has included researchers and practitioners in the area of obesity, nutrition, and child development. Families with young children and educators are also target audiences. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has served as a valuable and comprehensive research training experience for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In particular, students were trained in a collaborative and inter-disciplinary context that strengthens professional skill development. Students were required to learn about theoretical foundations and methodologies that cut across the developmental, social, and biological sciences in order to address complex social problems. As such, students gained a more comprehensive understanding of pediatric obesity and various approaches to address it. Because there were regular lab meetings for all individuals involved in the research, students also had opportunities to work with teams of diverse individuals. Throughout the course of this research project, students obtained skills in data collection, reduction, analysis, and manuscript/grant preparation. Importantly, they also presented research findings at national conferences and in applied educational settings. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The findings from this research have been disseminated in several ways. First, research findings from this project have been published in peer-reviewed journals that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Over the course of this project, the PI and students have also presented research results at a variety of national conferences such as the Society for Research in Child Development, Experimental Biology, and the National Council on Family Relations. Finally, the results of this research will be disseminated at an invited workshop to develop policies that focus on the relations between family relationships and childhood obesity. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Overall, the data obtained from this project have highlighted several areas of focus for future prevention/intervention efforts to reduce pediatric obesity. The data suggest that both parent-child relationships and individual differences in child temperament/regulation are important factors to consider in pediatric obesity research. From survey panel data, serial mediation models revealed a direct effect of caregiver attachment insecurity on children's unhealthful food consumption (sweet/salty snacks, fast food) and a significant indirect effect supporting the caregiver insecurity > negative emotion responses to child stress > emotion feeding styles > child unhealthful food consumption serial mediation path. Thus, parent attachment insecurity and associated emotion dysregulation strategies put them at risk for using emotion feeding styles which, in turn, predicted children's unhealthful food consumption. Insecure caregivers also had fewer quality mealtimes, and frequency/quality of family mealtimes are important for the development of healthful eating habits, especially in early childhood. Data collected from home observations also revealed important findings. For example, parental emotional responsiveness and emotional climate during mealtimes were shown to affect feeding practices, child eating behaviors, and weight status (Saltzman et al., 2016, Saltzman et al., 2017). Regulation of emotion is an important skill in social competence, and our finding suggest that it is also critical for adaptive behavior in food contexts as well. Additionally, videotaped mealtime data revealed that father availability and mealtime distractions affected responsive feeding behaviors (Saltzman et al., 2019). Finally, the data from this project suggest that parenting behavior and child genotype are important factors to consider in pediatric obesity research. In particular, our findings suggest that the association between children's weight status and caregiver restrictive feeding depends on child genotype and caregiver approaches to stress regulation. The data revealed that children who were homozygous for the COMT-Met allele, and who have caregivers who frequently use negative stress regulation strategies, were at the highest risk for caregiver restrictive feeding as BMI increases (Bost et al., 2017).
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2019
Citation:
Saltzman, J.A., Fiese, B.H., Bost, K.K. and McBride, B.A. 2019. Associations between father availability, mealtime distractions and routines, and maternal feeding responsiveness: An observational study. Journal of Family Psychology, 33, 465-475.
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Progress 10/01/17 to 09/30/18
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience includes researchers in the areas of obesity, nutrition, and child development as well as families with young children. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has served as a comprehensive research training experience for undergraduate and graduate students. Specifically, students are trained in a collaborative and transdisciplinary context. Students are required to learn about and implement research protocols that cut across the developmental, social, and biological sciences. In addition, students and faculty across disciplines meet on a regular basis to discuss data collection, coding, and analysis. As such, students gain knowledge about how to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches across disciplines in order to address important developmental issues and outcomes, and how to work together as a team to accomplish project goals. This gives students a more comprehensive understanding of the research process. Through this experience, students obtain skills in data collection using multiple methods, data reduction, analysis, and manuscript preparation as well as in professional development. In addition, two undergraduate and two graduate poster/paper submissions to present research findings from this project have been accepted at national conferences. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Data decoding is ongoing, and data are being analyzed to test study hypotheses. The findings will have implications for children, parents, and professionals working with young children and families. In particular, the findings will inform prevention and intervention efforts related to pediatric obesity and children's healthful eating behaviors. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?To continue to accomplish our goals, we will obtain observational data from at least 10 additional families, and continue to code and analyze existing data that have been collected. In addition, we will obtain laboratory data on child eating behaviors, child executive function, and parent-child interaction in order to obtain assessments in a more controlled setting.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
There have been several accomplishments toward these goals. Family mealtime videotapes have been coded for parent-child interaction, emotion regulation, and parental feeding behaviors. Both undergraduate and graduate students have participated in the coding using Interact software. During this reporting period, students have been trained and videotapes coded for child eating behaviors including food approach/withdrawal, bite frequency, and picky eating in order to obtain both maternal reports and observational assessments of child eating behavior. Analyses have also begun examining child temperament, attachment, and nutrition profiles as well as the relations between observed child behaviors and the gut microbiota.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2017
Citation:
Saltzman, J., Bost, K., Fiese, B., Wiley, A. and the STRONG Kids Team. 2017. Predictors and outcomes of mealtime emotional climate in families with preschoolers. Pediatric Psychology, 1-12. doi: 10.1093/jpepsy/jsx109.
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Progress 10/01/16 to 09/30/17
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience includes researchers in the areas of obesity, nutrition, and child development as well as families with young children and professionals working with children and families. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has served as a comprehensive research training experience for undergraduate and graduate students.Specifically, students are trained in a collaborative and transdisciplinary context. Students are required to learn about andimplement research protocols that cut across the developmental, social, and biological sciences. In addition, students andfaculty across disciplines meet on a regular basis to discuss data collection, coding, and analysis. As such, students gainknowledge about how to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches across disciplines in order to address importantdevelopmental issues and outcomes as well as how to work together as a team to accomplish project goals. This gives students amore comprehensive understanding of the research process. Through this experience, students obtain skills in datacollection using multiple methods, data reduction, analysis, and manuscript preparation as well as in professionaldevelopment. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Data collection is ongoing, and preliminary data are being analyzed. The findings will have implications for children, parents,and professionals working with young children and families. In particular, the findings will inform prevention and interventionefforts related to pediatric obesity and children's healthful eating behaviors. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?To continue to accomplish our goals, we will obtain additional observational data, and continue tocode and analyze existing data that have been collected. We will also continue to examine existing data and carry out preliminary analyses testing our central hypotheses.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
There have been several accomplishments toward these goals. Home observation data have been collected for an additional thirty families (total n = 110). Both undergraduate and graduate students have begun to code and organize videotaped family mealtime and child executive function data with faculty supervision. Maternal attachment narratives are currently being coded. Preliminary analyses have begun to examine data distributions, and additional preliminary evidence reveals expected associations between child temperament and eating behavior. Child attachment security has been found to be negatively associated with sugar intake.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2017
Citation:
Bost, K.K., Teran-Garcia, M., Donovan, S.M., Fiese, B.H. and the STRONG Kids Team. 2017. Child body mass index, genotype, and parenting in the prediction of restrictive feeding. Pediatric Obesity, [Epub ahead of print], doi: 10.1111/ijpo.12219.
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Progress 10/01/15 to 09/30/16
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience includes researchers in the area of obesity, nutrition, and child development as well as families with young children. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has served as a comprehensive research training experience for undergraduate and graduate students. Specifically, students are trained in a collaborative and transdisciplinary context. Students are required to learn about and implement research protocols that cut across the developmental, social, and biological sciences. In addition, students and faculty across disciplines meet on a regular basis to discuss data collection, coding, and analysis. As such, students gain knowledge about how to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches across disciplines in order to address important developmental issues and outcomes, and how to work together as a team to accomplish project goals. This gives students a more comprehensive understanding of the research process. Through this experience, students obtain skills in data collection using multiple methods, data reduction, analysis, and manuscript preparation as well as in professional development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Data collection is ongoing, and preliminary data are being analyzed. The findings will have implications for children, parents, and professionals working with young children and families. In particular, the findings will inform prevention and intervention efforts related to pediatric obesity and children's healthful eating behaviors. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?To continue to accomplish our goals, we will obtain observational data from at least 50 additional families, and continue to code and analyze existing data that have been collected.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
There have been several accomplishments toward these goals. Both undergraduate and graduate students have continued to collect home observation data that include videotaped family mealtimes, child emotion-related behavior and executive function, parenting quality, and eating-related behaviors. A total of 80 home observations have been completed. Undergraduate and graduate students have also been trained on mealtime coding schemes using Interact software. They have completed reliability training.
Publications
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Progress 10/01/14 to 09/30/15
Outputs
Target Audience:During this reporting period, undergraduate and graduate students have been trained on several of the protocols that are being used in this study. These protocols include how to carry out home observations with participating families as well how to complete child temperament, executive functioning, and mealtime assessments. Students are also being trained on data entry and coding of mealtime videos and child executive functioning. Students have met weekly for reliability training. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has served as a research and professional training experience for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Especially valuable is the fact that students are trained in a collaborative and inter-disciplinary context so that team building and leadership skills are learned and practiced. Students are required to learn about research protocols that cut across the developmental, social, and biological sciences. As such, students gain knowledge about how to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches across disciplines in order to address important developmental issues and concerns, and pediatric obesity is a great societal concern. This gives students a more comprehensive understanding of the different methodologies used to study children and families. Because there are regular lab meetings for all individuals involved in the research, students also have opportunities to work with teams of diverse individuals that include faculty members, graduate students, and community professionals. Through this experience, students obtain skills in data collection, reduction, analysis, and manuscript preparation as well as in professional development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The data are being collected, entered into datafies, and preliminary analyses are currently being conducted. The findings will have implications for children, families, and professionals working with children and families. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?To continue to accomplish our goals, we will recruit families with young children and conduct home observations. Now that teams of students have been trained, we expect that the number of home observations completed during a week will be 3-4. We also plan to begin coding the mealtime data for emotion regulation and eating behaviors as well as the videotaped executive functioning STROOP tasks. Child temperament characteristics will also be coded from these data.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
There have been several accomplishments toward these goals. First, in order collect home observation data, students have to be trained on several methodological and ethical protocols. In addition, data that have already been collected have to be coded for training purposes as well. During the last reporting period, graduate and undergraduate students attended lab sessions that focused on (1) learning and practicing home observation protocols, (2) coding of behavioral data from previously collected data, and (3) ethical considerations in conducting research with children and families. For this reporting period, families with children 18 months or older are being recruited, and 12 home observations have been completed. These data include: (1) parent-child attachment q-sort, (2) videotaped family mealtime, and (3) child executive functioning tasks. Videotapes have been transferred to secure files for coding, and q-sort data are being entered into data files for analysis.
Publications
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Progress 03/19/14 to 09/30/14
Outputs
Target Audience: During this reporting period, students have been trained on how to conduct home observations with participating families as well as how to complete child temperament and food-related protocols. Students are also being trained on coding of mealtime videos. Students have met weekly for reliability training. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Training for two graduate students on how to conduct home observations with families and how to complete child temperament and executive functioning protocols. Laboratory meetings also include graduate students and faculty members who are also collaborating on an interdisciplinary research project which allows these students additional opportunities for professional development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Training will be completed and families will be contacted to participate in the home observations. Data will be collected and preliminary findings will be reported.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
There have been several accomplishments toward these goals. First, in order to collect home observation data, students have to be trained on several methodological and ethical protocols. In addition, data that have already been collected have to be coded for training purposes as well. During this reporting period, graduate students have been attending lab sessions that focus on (1) learning and practicing home observation protocols and (2) coding of behavioral data from previously collected data.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Accepted
Year Published:
2014
Citation:
Bost, K., Wiley, A., Fiese, B., Hammons, A., McBride, B.and The STRONG Kids Team. Associations between adult attachment style, emotion regulation, and preschool childrens food consumption. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 35, 50-61.
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