Recent decades have seen a rise in mental health problems among children and adolescents. Despite a proliferation of studies describing effective school-based mental health programs, reviews of current research in this field suggest a strong lack of consensus concerning the definition of school mental health and its constructs. In the present…

The U.S. legal system gives parents the authority and responsibility to make decisions about their children's health care, and favors parental rights over society's collective responsibility to provide for children's welfare. Neither the federal government nor state governments have an affirmative obligation to protect and promote children's…

Physical activity is critical to healthy development of children. It is well documented that helping children develop and sustain a physically active lifestyle requires children to become motivated. Many studies have been conducted in the past 2.5 decades on determinants and correlates for children and adolescents' physical activity…

Background: This paper discusses the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention's effort to develop a web-based service called Project CREATE that responds to a need for targeted health promotion materials expressed by directors of HIV/STD prevention services in predominately rural states. Purpose: Project CREATE allows users to select customized…

An assumption that knowledge arises from research outcomes has been expanded in recent years to include the possibility that knowledge may also be created from the process of engaging in research. Action research (AR) is particularly well suited to such knowledge development. This article offers a brief overview of knowledge in AR as well as the…

Background: At the heart of this polemic lies the view that contemporary research in PE and Health (PEH) has largely overlooked one of the key determinants of social behaviour, social class and its expression in and outside schools; an omission that has quite serious consequences for how we (researchers and teachers) think about and conceptualise…

Over the last decade, the relationship between boys, young men and sex and relationships education (SRE) is one that has been characterised by a history of problematising. One of the main difficulties lies with young men's engagement with the subject, and in this article I make a retrospective examination of recent classroom experience with young…

In this "Seventeenth Delphine Hanna Commemorative Lecture," Boyce draws on the legacy of Delphine Hanna's work in science-based curriculum to address the need for today's educators to balance both professional mission and disciplinary knowledge. In the mid 1960s, Franklin Henry proposed the notion that the foundation of physical…

This article is a response to a number of articles that use a culturally relevant prevention (CRP) approach for ethnic and racial minorities. The reaction is from a research practitioner's viewpoint. The authors argue in favor of determining an operational definition of cultural relevance by implementing prevention services with fidelity in the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline a three-stage process for engaging with students to develop school level indicators of health in sequential class groups students first generated, then categorised indicators and finally developed schematic representations of their analyses. There is a political and practical need to develop…

Although the completion of the Human Genome Project will offer new insight into diseases and help develop efficient, personalized treatment or prevention programs, it will also raise new and non-trivial public health issues. Many of these issues fall under the professional purview of public health workers. As members of the public health…

Increasingly, researchers in the areas of eating disorders and obesity prevention are recognizing the benefits of collaborative efforts aimed at curbing the spectrum of eating-related disturbances. Research suggests that eating disorders and overweight tend to co-occur, and that individuals cross over from one eating-related disturbance to…

Evaluates a point-of-purchase nutrition education program in Pawtucket (Rhode Island). Uses consumer interviews to evaluate the effect of awareness of shelf labels on purchase behavior. Reports increases in shoppers' ability to identify correct shelf labels and in the number of shoppers who were encouraged to buy the identified foods. (FMW)

Policy makers and researchers may have different agendas as to what constitutes "evidence". This paper reviews some of the issues currently debated in the UK and elsewhere about researchers' understandings of how social research can usefully inform the policy-making process, and their techniques for making it available. Using examples…

Describes pilot test of survey of grocery store product displays to measure the amount of health education information provided and the proportion of the display devoted to "healthier" products. Finds that inter-rate reliability ranged between 0.73 and 0.78 for the healthiness indices and between 0.30 and 0.67 for the health education measures.…