Chair's Welcome

Welcome to the latest ISBNPA Young Adult Special Interest Group Newsletter.

We've got a packed edition for you this quarter. We're excited to feature the important work of the HAPYUS youth advisory board, including an interview with one of the members. Also in this edition, we're promoting two award opportunities, one for mentorship and one for publications in 2022. Please see details below and consider nominating a colleague or even your yourself. Also, don't miss our member survey linked below. We want to hear from you so we can better meet your needs as SIG members. Finally, be sure to check out the latest science focused on adolescence and young adults in the recent publications section.

As we approach the annual conference in June, be on the lookout for another edition where we will feature all the young adult related sessions and networking opportunities. In the meantime, please forward this along to likeminded colleagues dedicated to health promotion among adolescents, emerging and young adults.

Dr. Melinda Hutchesson, Chair of ISBNPA Young Adult SIG

Announcements

Two new Young Adults SIG award opportunities are now open. Don't miss your chance to submit nominations by March 31st. Please see details below.

Mentor Award

We're looking to acknowledge inspiring mentors and leaders working in the field of behavioral science with a focus on young adults.

Research should be related to nutrition, physical activity, sedentary behavior, or sleep and focused on young people 16-35 years of age.

Nominate yourself or someone else he re

Publication Award

We are looking for innovative Young Adult papers published in 2022. Papers must be directly or indirectly relevant to diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and/or sleep.

We will be selecting two award winners based on career stage (Post-graduate student and Early & Mid career Researchers). Nominees are required to be first author on the paper and a member of our Young Adult SIG.

Nominate yourself or someone else here

ISBNPA Young Adult SIG Member Survey

We are interested in learning more about our members, and also gaining our members' input into strategies and events to employ to support our aims. Please take 5 minutes to share your thoughts here

New Special Issue on Nutrition, Weight, and Health Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults

Nutrients has recently opened a call for a new special issue focused specifically on nutrition, weight, and health outcomes among young adults. You can find details on this special issue here. The call for submissions is open through December 15, 2023, so if you or your colleagues have relevant data, we encourage you to submit!

Quarterly Spotlight:

Engaging Youth in Research

In line with growing global calls, it is crucial for researchers to actively involve and support adolescents in making decisions about research that affects them. To address this call, we established the Health Advisory Panel for Youth at the University of Sydney (HAPYUS, pronounced ‘Happy Us’) in October 2021.

Photo: Dr. Stephanie Partridge (left) Alexi Cross (right)

Background and Highlights from Dr. Partridge:

Adolescents were given the opportunity to identify key issues and help shape our chronic disease prevention research projects for 12 months. This opportunity endeavoured to help create leadership and capacity building opportunities for adolescents within the research sector.

Highlights included the 16 members of HAPYUS publishing an essay in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health outlining the risks young people are facing which could contribute to future chronic ill health, including the rise of social media, the promotion of unhealthy foods, and barriers to being physically active. Young people recognise these issues are interconnected through the digitalisation of society and have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their call to action was broadcast in a live interview on Channel 7’s Sunrise and a front-page article in the Sydney Morning Herald (May 2022). The group collaborated with researchers to co-design the Health4Me intervention, as well as other research projects still underway. Other advocacy opportunities included presenting at the Australian Medical Association Conference (the peak professional body for medical doctors in Australia), and discussions with policy advisors of the state and federal Government.

Our formal evaluation of the youth advisory group is currently under review, and we are looking forward to sharing our analyses of the youth advisors’ experiences when available. This project provided important pilot evidence and we are excited to continue our youth engagement research over the next 3 years thanks to additional funding support from a Medical Research Futures Fund Grant.

Q&A with Alexi:

Q: Do you have any tips for researchers or health engagement staff who want to include young people’s perspectives from rural and remote NSW in their projects?

Alexi: I would never have known about this if I wasn’t even in the right networks. So, I think staff or researchers should reach directly out to schools and youth councils. That’s how I first found out about the projects I have been involved with. You will end up with 2-3 students who are passionate about what you do from a rural background. I really think the school level is where the best kind of engagement occurs, and you should include the teachers too as they can facilitate your contact with the students. But I think social media is important too. Quite a lot of my friends in HAPYUS found out about it via socials. And the program needs to be set up online using a good online platform so it’s accessible for us outside the big cities.

Q: What do you wish for the future of the HAPYUS program and youth involvement in projects like yours?

Alexi: We are just happy that our voices are heard and are having an impact. It is humbling to know that the work we did can impact someone. I think that’s awesome, and I would love to see the campaign outcomes of the digital intervention Stephanie is developing. I would love to see more discussions about adolescent health like we started with our research paper.

*Note: for a full recently published interview with Dr. Partridge and Alexi, see here.

Recent Publications

Don’t miss these new publications relevant to young adults’ health and wellness. Have a new publication you’d like us to feature on Twitter or our next newsletter? Email our communications chairs he re.

Haslam RL, Baldwin JN, Pezdirc K, Truby H, Attia J, Hutchesson MJ, Burrows T, Callister R, Hides L, Bonevski B, Kerr DA, Kirkpatrick SI, Rollo ME, McCaffrey TA, Collins CE. Efficacy of technology-based personalised feedback on diet quality in young Australian adults: results for the advice, ideas and motivation for my eating (Aim4Me) randomised controlled trial. Public Health Nutr. 2023 Feb 9:1-13. doi: 10.1017/S1368980023000253. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36755380. Find here

Hutchesson MJ, Whatnall MC, Yazin N, Fenton S, Duncan MJ, Kay-Lambkin FJ, Burrows TL. Health behavior interventions for university students measuring mental health outcomes: A scoping review. Front Public Health. 2022 Dec 7;10:1063429. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.1063429. PMID: 36568797; PMCID: PMC9771454. Find here

Partridge SR, Sim KA, Armaghanian N, Steinbeck KS, Cheng HL. Adolescence and young adulthood: an untapped window of opportunity for obesity prevention. Public Health Res Pract. 2022 Oct 12;32(3):3232223. doi: 10.17061/phrp3232223. PMID: 36220559. Find here

Raeside R, Spielman K, Maguire S, Mihrshahi S, Steinbeck K, Kang M, Laranjo L, Hyun K, Redfern J, Partridge SR; Health4Me Team. A healthy lifestyle text message intervention for adolescents: protocol for the Health4Me randomized controlled trial. BMC Public Health. 2022 Sep 23;22(1):1805. doi: 10.1186/s12889-022-14183-9. PMID: 36138375; PMCID: PMC9503214. Find here

Whatnall M, Ashton LM, Adam MTP, McCormick H, Clarke ED, Lavelle F, Burrows T, Hutchesson M, Collins CE. How Can We Support Healthy Eating in Young Adults with Low Diet Quality? A Survey of Users of the 'No Money No Time' Healthy Eating Website. Nutrients. 2022 Dec 7;14(24):5218. doi: 10.3390/nu14245218. PMID: 36558376; PMCID: PMC9780950. Find here

Reading JM, Crane MM, Carlyle K, Perera RA, LaRose JG. A Self-Guided Lifestyle Intervention for Young Men: Findings from the ACTIVATE Randomized Pilot Trial. J Mens Health. 2022;18(9):191. doi: 10.31083/j.jomh1809191. Epub 2022 Sep 14. PMID: 36846742; PMCID: PMC9949796. Find here

Brown KL, Graham AK, Perera RA, LaRose JG. Eating to cope: Advancing our understanding of the effects of exposure to racial discrimination on maladaptive eating behaviors. Int J Eat Disord. 2022 Dec;55(12):1744-1752. doi: 10.1002/eat.23820. Epub 2022 Oct 7. PMID: 36205358; PMCID: PMC9742121. Find here

Encourage your colleagues to sign up for our SIG newsletter!

You or your colleagues can join this mailing list by updating your membership profile and adding the SIG to your preferences; or by filling out this google form.

Contributors to this Newsletter: Dr. Jessica LaRose, Dr. Stephanie Partridge, Dr. Melinda Hutchesson, and Alexi Cross.