226915 Youth Can! Grow Healthy: A positive youth development program to empower young adolescents

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Andrew Carberry, BS , Department of Nutrition, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
Marsha Spence, PhD, MS-MPH, RD , Department of Nutrition, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
The purpose of this presentation is to describe an after-school, positive youth development and gardening program, which used youth-led participatory action research with a Photovoice methodology to assess the community's food and physical activity environments. This novel pilot project targeted young adolescents to advocate for healthier community environments, to increase their self-efficacy for healthy dietary and physical activity behaviors, and to improve their level of school connectedness. The program was implemented in collaboration with University of Tennessee (UT) researchers, UT Extension agents, Beardsley Farm, an urban demonstration farm, and a local school district's Coordinated School Health Program. A quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design was used. A convenience sample was recruited from the intervention and comparison schools. Baseline data at the intervention school revealed that that 81% (9/11) of students in the program had an age- and gender-specific BMI ≥95th percentile. Preliminary results showed that on the day prior to survey administration, 53% of students ate vegetables ≤ 1 time and 61% ate fruit ≤ 1 time. Photovoice assessment results will be shown and comparison data will be presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. The results of this pilot project are important to the advancement of youth development programs that empower students to be agents of change to improve their food and physical activity environments in their communities and schools. Further, the areas of youth development and youth-led participatory action research can inform all health promotion programs on ways to increase effectiveness in behavior change.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Advocacy for health and health education
Chronic disease management and prevention
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs

Learning Objectives:
List the 5 C's of positive youth development programs. Define photovoice as a youth-led participatory action reseach method. Describe how photovoice can teach adolescents about advocating for a healthy food and physcial activity envrionment.

Keywords: Participatory Action Research, Photovoice

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the primary investigator of this youth development project and have had extensive training in public health nutrition and public health.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.