Welcome to CRESP's Newsletter!
Thank you for your support and interest in CRESP's work. O
ur goal in sharing this newsletter with you is to share timely updates on CRESP's recently published work, presentations, webinars, and other resources to continue the dialog and
better understand critical issues in education, community health, and human services.
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HEALTHY BEVERAGES IN KIDS’ MEALS, POLICY RESEARCH
In the fall of 2018, Wilmington, Delaware enacted a policy (
House Bill 79
) requiring that healthy beverages (i.e., milk, water, 100% juice) be the default choices at restaurants serving bundled children’s meals. At that time, CRESP embarked on a study to evaluate the impact of the healthy beverage policy on Wilmington restaurants, thanks to a research grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Healthy Eating Research Program
. CRESP partnered with the University of California Nutrition Policy Institute & American Heart Association
and collected baseline data about children’s meal beverages at affected restaurants in December of 2018, prior to policy implementation. This past July (2019), the team collected post-policy data and recently shared their findings in a research brief and also with the research community (see below).
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Understanding the Landscape of Default Beverage Policies and Preliminary Data from Delaware Restaurants
Before the Healthy Beverage policy (limiting the
prevalence of sugary beverages in bundled children’s meals)
went into effect in January 2019, a CRESP research team
—
led by Dr. Allison Karpyn and supported by CRESP staff and students Adam Apsley, Aly Blakeney, Tiffany Demenna, Carly Hill, Layne Humphrey, Tara Tracy, and Henry Wolgast
—
conducted a baseline evaluation of those restaurants affected by the ordinance.
In a new research brief,
Understanding the landscape of default beverage policies and preliminary data from Delaware restaurants
,
CRESP
researchers outline their initial results and the state of sugary beverage legislation across the United States. This project will go statewide in the coming weeks.
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CRESP Scholar Presents on Impact of the Healthy Beverage Policy in Wilmington and Engages in Global Research Opportunities
Nicole Kennedy joined CRESP as a Summer Scholar and spent the ten weeks working to better understand the impact of the healthy beverage policy (House Bill 79) in Wilmington, Delaware. She assisted with data collection and the creation of a
CRESP research brief, as well as coordinated with researchers at the University of California. In her continued employment with CRESP during the 2019-2020 academic year, she will continue to work on statewide pre- and post-policy assessments. In addition to her contributions to the beverage work, she also helped to create recommendations for the Bahamian government centered around school feeding (forthcoming publication to be shared on
CRESP's website). Nicole is thankful for these unique research opportunities, and is especially grateful to her mentors, Dr. Allison Karpyn and Research Coordinator Tara Tracy, as well as her fellow Undergraduate Research Assistants and survey partners, Henry Wolgast and Adam Apsley.
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Image 1.
Summer Scholar Nicole Kennedy presenting at the ACCEL Community Research Exchange Conference (9/23/19). The beverage cups are from restaurants at which surveys were administered, providing a visual reference for the volume of unhealthy beverages that can be made available in bundled children’s meals.
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CRUE Blog Provides Resources for Education Researchers and Educators Using Research to Address Issues Affecting Schools
Center for Research Use in Education (CRUE)
is a 5-year project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education to better understand how decision-making and problem-solving happen in schools and how education researchers interact with educators to use research to address the current issues of schools. In addition to the surveys underway of educators and education researchers, the staff have been posting articles and blogs at their website,
research4schools.org
. Dr. Elizabeth Farley-Ripple, recently discussed the concept of “research impact” in a 6-part blog series. These blogs can be found at
http://www.research4schools.org/blog/
. Dr, Horatio Blackman looked at Educators’ Networks and Educators’ Views on Research based on pilot data collected from the
Survey of Evidence in Education
. The results can be found at
http://www.research4schools.org/publications/.
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CRESP Graduate Research Assistant Danielle Riser Awarded Child Care Research Scholars Grant to Support Dissertation Research on Child Care Decision-Making for Families who have Young Children with Disabilities
Child care provides an essential service to many families by allowing parents to participate in the workforce and helping their children develop in a nurturing environment. However, families who have young children with disabilities have constrained child care options and often report more difficulty in finding child care. The child care decision-making process is more complicated for these families because they must navigate their child care needs and the early childhood special education system. Research is needed to examine the child care preferences and child care arrangement patterns of families who have young children with disabilities, and how these families negotiate between their child care needs and early childhood special education services.
CRESP graduate research assistant Danielle Riser aims to address this need by conducting an explanatory mixed-methods study in her dissertation,
Understanding Child Care Decision-Making for Families who have Young Children with Disabilities: An Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study
. To explore national trends in child care preferences and arrangements, this study will use a national sample of households with young children who have disabilities or special needs from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE; NSECE Project Team, 2019). To gain a deeper understanding of the results from the national data, interviews will be conducted with a separate sample of families in Delaware who have young children with disabilities. Integrating the interview findings with the national survey results will provide useful insights into how to better tailor policy and services to facilitate access to child care for families who have young children with disabilities.
Riser was recently awarded the Early Care and Education Research Scholars: Child Care Research Scholars dissertation grant, awarded through the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, an office of the Administration for Children and Families, under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The grant supports dissertation research on child care policy issues in partnership with State Child Care and Development Fund lead agencies. Riser was awarded $25,000 per year for two years to assist in the completion of her dissertation research.
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United Nations Blog Outlines
The 10 Things Food Advocates Need to Know Before Working with A Supermarket
Dr. Allison Karpyn, CRESP senior associate director, alongside co-authors Tara Tracy, CRESP research coordinator, and Henry Wolgast, CRESP undergraduate research assistant, recently published
The 10 Things Food Advocates Need to Know Before Working with A Supermarket
released as a blog post by
The Bloomberg American Health Initiative
, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The initiative focuses on research and potential solutions to these five critical health issues, collaborating with Bloomberg academic fellows and local partners throughout the United States
.
The CRESP article serves as a guide for food advocates, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and other groups looking to stimulate healthier purchasing habits through tailored interventions with the food retail community. These types of interventions may include shelf tagging to improve signage for healthier items, couponing produce, or healthy check-out lines. The article focuses on cultivating better intervention strategies that food retailers will find profitable, efficient, and important in increasing healthy purchasing habits. Drawing on Dr. Karpyn’s years of experience working with food retailers to cultivate healthier food environments, this article is an effective guide for anyone looking to collaborate with food retailers to promote healthier food purchasing patterns.
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Defending Equal Access to Food
CRESP Senior Associate Director Dr. Allison Karpyn was featured in the latest issue of the
University of Delaware’s
Research
magazine
—a free publication showcasing the discoveries, inventions and excellence of the University’s faculty, staff and students.
The latest ‘Disruptors’ issue showcases Dr. Karpyn’s research on food insecurity—an
individual or family’s limited or uncertain access to adequate nutritious food. This can mean not enough food, or it can refer to a reduction in the quality, variety or desirability of the food available. It’s a public health issue that contributes to hunger and also to health conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
In the Q&A style article, Dr. Karpyn talks about what drives her research interests and compels her “to better translate research to the community–our teachers, health care professionals, community leaders and policymakers. UD is leading several translational grants, including the ACCEL Program and the Center for Research Use in Education, to understand how to measure and actually make a difference through listening to needs and sharing data. This work is aligned with UD’s civic engagement work, which is growing. Understanding how to measure and capture a university’s efforts in the community is a wonderful problem.”
Dr. Karpyn also points to her 2018 book,
Food and Public Health: A Practical Introduction
, which
offers a contextualized, accessible introduction to understanding the foundations (and contradictions) at the intersection of these two topics. Edited by
Dr. Karpyn
,
and featuring contributions from twenty-four insightful authors, the book distills the historical, political, sociological, and scientific factors influencing what we eat and where our food comes from, then offers actionable insights for future nutritionists, social workers, dietitians, and researchers in public health.
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CRESP Presentations and Workshops
(October 14th, 2019)
Dr. Allison Karpyn and CRESP undergraduate research assistant Henry Wolgast
will deliver the presentation entitled, "Developing a Model for Assessing a University-wide Community Engagement Initiative: Tools and Lessons Learned," at the
2019 Assessment Institute in Indianapolis
(October, 2019).
(October 25th, 2019)
Dr. Allison Karpyn
will present a session on the Pervasiveness of Food Insecurity to the Delaware Nurses Association. The presentation will evaluate statewide interventions to combat food insecurity and identify efficient community resources.
(November 2-6, 2019)
CRESP will present, “Toward Tailored Interventions at Farmers Markets: Understanding the Unique Qualities of Hispanics’ Fruit and Vegetable Purchasing Patterns,” at the
American Public Health Association
(APHA) annual conference in Philadelphia.
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Zachary K. Collier
Zachary K. Collier is a 2019 High-Performance Computing Early Career Awardee in the University of Delaware’s School of Education. He is a statistician whose research aims to advance the techniques, use, and interpretation of finite mixture models. He also has several forthcoming publications developing effective and efficient heuristic optimization data-mining-type search algorithms in propensity score analysis for emerging data-intensive applications in education and health. These intensive datasets include non-random attrition, incomplete longitudinal data, and selection bias.
Professor Collier is a strategic faculty hire in the University of Delaware’s Data Science Institute (DSI) and is a co-chair of the annual DSI Symposium. He also chairs the Education Statistics and Research Methods program, where he leads a team of faculty with a diverse set of methodological expertise. Collier holds his Ph.D. and M.A.E. in Measurement and Statistics from the University of Florida. Before graduate school, he taught middle school in Gainesville, Florida and high school probability and statistics in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
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Kathleen McCallops
Hi! I’m Kathleen McCallops, and I live in Newark. I am originally from Hudson, Ohio. Go Buckeyes! I am a fourth-year PhD student in the Human Development and Family Sciences program. I began working at CRESP this September as a Graduate Research Assistant, and I split my time between working on projects with Dr. Allison Karpyn and Dr. Sue Giancola. For my first two years in the PhD program, I worked with Dr. Tia Barnes on projects related to teachers’ emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, and self-efficacy in using culturally responsive pedagogy, and the RELATE tool used to measure the social processes that occur in self-contained special education classrooms for students with emotional disturbance. After working with Dr. Barnes, I spent the last year working with Dr. Ann Aviles and Dr. Yasser Payne on the Street Participant Action Research (PAR) Project. This mixed-method project examines violence and health among street-identified Black men and women in Wilmington.
My research interests focus on youth experiencing housing instability and how that affects their academic achievements and mental health. Prior to starting the PhD program at UD, I worked as a College Access Advisor in the Cleveland Public Schools. As an advisor, I provided students with information and resources to help them navigate the college process. Many of my students were experiencing housing instability, so I saw firsthand how this instability negatively affected their aspirations to attend college and affected their mental health. I wanted to pursue a PhD to learn how to better support my students and other students experiencing housing instability. It was not until I came to UD and began working with Dr. Aviles that I learned about the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which is a federal policy that mandates supports that housing unstable children and youth are entitled to receive to ensure they have equal access to education. As an educator working with housing unstable students, I was not informed about this policy, and neither were my students. As a result, I have become interested in how this Act supports students and their families and how information about the Act is disseminated to teachers, administrators, and staff.
Recently, because of my work with Dr. Karpyn, I have also become interested in food insecurity. It was not until I took her Food Policy course that I realized just how much food insecurity affects youth and families experiencing housing instability. My goal is for my dissertation research focus on both food and housing insecurity. In addition to my research, I am also a member of Swipe out Hunger, which provides meal swipes for students on campus who do not have enough to eat. After graduating with my PhD, I plan on continuing to conduct research on housing instability and food insecurity.
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Newark, DE 19716
Phone: 302-831-2928
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