Assessing Healthful Eating and Physical Activity Practices in Places Children Learn

Site-level assessment questionnaires (SLAQs) were developed to assess nutrition and physical activity practices and environments in schools and other places children spend time in order to facilitate program planning and evaluation. After expert panel review for content validity, questionnaires were feasibility tested by users in six schools, three early care and education programs, and two out-of-school programs. Findings indicate that the questionnaires are feasible and useful for planning interventions. Extension programs can use SLAQs to support policy, systems, and environment change efforts that promote healthful eating and physical activity in children and to measure intervention effectiveness

'Against the World': Michael Field, female marriage and the aura of amateurism'

This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as ‘Michael Field’ in the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic movement. Bradley’s bold statement that she and Cooper were ‘closer married’ than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a ‘female marriage’, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field’s exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to ‘parse’ the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape

SNAP-Ed physical activity interventions in low-income schools are associated with greater cardiovascular fitness among 5th and 7th grade students in California

IntroductionCalifornia's Department of Public Health (CDPH) distributes Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) funding, known as CalFresh Healthy Living (CFHL) in California, to local health departments to implement school-based physical activity/nutrition interventions. We determined the association between intervention presence/dose and student cardiorespiratory fitness and BMI.MethodsThis cross-sectional, observational study included 5th and 7th grade students with 2016-17 FitnessGram® results who attended SNAP-Ed eligible California schools. Intervention group students attended schools with CDPH-CFHL interventions during October 2015-September 2016 (n = 904 schools; 97,504 students, 49% female); comparison group students attended schools without CDPH-CFHL interventions (n = 3,506 schools; 372,298 students, 49% female). Adjusted multilevel models determined the association between school-level intervention presence/dose and students' cardiorespiratory fitness (estimated VO2max) and BMI z-score, and tested for effect modification by student grade and sex.ResultsStudents attending intervention schools demonstrated greater VO2max (males: 0.18 mL/kg per min, 95% CI: 0.03, 0.34; females = 0.26 mL/kg per min, 95% CI: 0.13, 0.39) and lower BMI z-scores (males: -0.03, 95% CI: -0.05, -0.02; females = -0.02, 95% CI: -0.04, -0.01) than students in comparison schools. Students in schools with the highest intervention levels demonstrated higher VO2max (0.37 (95% CI: 0.06, 0.16) and 0.22 (95% CI: 0.02, 0.42), respectively), than comparison students, with the strongest associations seen for females and 7th graders.ConclusionOn average, students in schools with CDPH-CFHL physical activity interventions demonstrated better cardiorespiratory fitness and slightly lower BMI z-scores than students in comparable schools without such programing. Investment in these interventions may positively impact students' cardiorespiratory health, though further causal investigation is warranted

Driving a Public Health Culture of Quality: How Far Down the Highway Have Local Health Departments Traveled?

CONTEXT: There has been an extensive investment in building public health organizational capacity to improve performance and prepare for accreditation. An evolving perspective has focused not only on the practice of quality improvement (QI) within the health department but also upon the extent the culture of QI is embraced within the agency. OBJECTIVE: No studies have examined the current national baseline of QI culture implementation, nor estimated the degree of QI sophistication local health departments (LHDs) have attained. We attempt to fill this void by aligning the findings from the QI module of the National Association of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO) 2010 Profile of LHDs against the constructs defined by the QI Maturity Tool and the NACCHO QI Roadmap (Roadmap to a Culture of Quality Improvement). DESIGN: Specific questions regarding QI activities from the 2010 Profile Study QI module were used to assign responding LHDs to stages within the Roadmap. We also used data from the QI Maturity Tool administered to all LHDs in the 16 participating Multi-State Learning Collaborative states in 2010 and 2011. On the basis of this matched set, we applied the summative domain scores algorithm, classified agencies into 1 of 5 groups, compared our findings with those of the NACCHO survey, and aligned our categories to those of the Roadmap. RESULTS: Nearly 80% of LHDs classified using the NACCHO Profile data were assigned to group 3 or 4 versus 48% using the QI Maturity Tool. Results from the cross-tabulations of the matched data set between the QI Maturity Tool classifications and the NACCHO Profile classifications revealed exact alignment 30% of the time. Forty-nine of 163 agencies were classified in the same grouping in both schemata. In addition, 84% of the agencies were classified within 1 neighboring category. CONCLUSIONS: The results revealed that half, if not most, LHDs fall within the middle categories of QI maturity and sophistication, regardless of which classification system was deployed

Le naturalisme en Autriche

La présence d’éléments naturalistes dans la littérature autrichienne est peu connue. En l’analysant dans des œuvres parues entre les années 1880 et les années 1970, d’Anzengruber à Innerhofer, ce volume permet de découvrir l’héritage naturaliste de Schnitzler, les réactions de Kraus, mais aussi la découverte de quelques oubliés de l’histoire littéraire et d’une terre fertile en productions naturalistes, la Moravie