People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) engage in lesser physical activity (PA) and more time in sedentary activities as compared to those without disabilities. A subset of people with IDD who are most vulnerable to develop habits detrimental to health is the emerging adults who are transitioning from adolescence...
Over the last 60 years, supplemental strength and conditioning for improving sport performance has gone from being nearly non-existent to a cornerstone feature of elite collegiate, amateur, and professional athletics. Concurrent with this profession-related evolution, technologies for monitoring and tracking physical performance have become more prevalent and useful. As an...
Health systems financing aims at providing adequate services, ensuring sufficient providers’ incentives, and protecting individuals and families from financial catastrophe. Health services are financed through government funding, taxation, out-of-pocket payments, insurance, donations and voluntary aid. Low- income countries mostly rely on out-of-pocket payments. In South East Asia region, the latter...
Evidence-based interventions (EBIs), which demonstrate efficacy in research settings, are rarely sustained when implemented in public health organizations. Rather, EBIs are often de-adopted - potentially undermining the positive benefits of the EBIs for the communities that access them. The lack of sustainability is particularly troubling among public health organizations that...
Childhood obesity and food insecurity are public health issues that often coexist, and both conditions are more prevalent among rural compared to non-rural populations. Social ecological prevention efforts are recommended, yet limited research has examined how rural family-home environments may influence obesity-preventing and -promoting behaviors. The purpose of this dissertation...
School garden programs have become increasingly popular for their diverse, positive benefits. School gardens are often promoted as a relatively low cost means to offer hands-on learning opportunities that may foster academic achievement, particularly in the sciences, however only six studies have been published on the impact of garden education...
In this thesis we develop a theoretical framework for the identification of situations where the equal frequency (EF) or equal variance (EV) subclassification may produce lower bias and/or variance of the estimator. We conduct simulation studies to examine the EF and EV approaches under different types of model misspecification. We...
Falls caused by slips are a major health risk to older adults and place a large financial strain on the health care system. Previous research has found that individuals can learn to recover their balance after being exposed to a series of simulated slips. However, training large numbers of older...
As childhood obesity rises in the United States, so does the need for effective, sustainable physical activity interventions. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of an early morning care program as well as determine the program’s effects on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) during the program and...