School of Public Health

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Family structure and multiple domains of child well-being in the United States: a cross-sectional study
    (Springer Nature, 2015-02-21) Krueger, Patrick M; Jutte, Douglas P; Franzini, Luisa; Elo, Irma; Hayward, Mark D
    We examine the association between family structure and children’s health care utilization, barriers to health care access, health, and schooling and cognitive outcomes and assess whether socioeconomic status (SES) accounts for those family structure differences. We advance prior research by focusing on understudied but increasingly common family structures including single father families and five different family structures that include grandparents. Our data on United States children aged birth through 17 (unweighted N = 198,864) come from the 1997–2013 waves of the National Health Interview Survey, a nationally representative, publicly available, household-based sample. We examine 17 outcomes across nine family structures, including married couple, cohabiting couple, single mother, and single father families, with and without grandparents, and skipped-generation families that include children and grandparents but not parents. The SES measures include family income, home ownership, and parents’ or grandparents’ (depending on who is in the household) employment and education. Compared to children living with married couples, children in single mother, extended single mother, and cohabiting couple families average poorer outcomes, but children in single father families sometimes average better health outcomes. The presence of grandparents in single parent, cohabiting, or married couple families does not buffer children from adverse outcomes. SES only partially explains family structure disparities in children’s well-being. All non-married couple family structures are associated with some adverse outcomes among children, but the degree of disadvantage varies across family structures. Efforts to understand and improve child well-being might be most effective if they recognize the increasing diversity in children’s living arrangements.
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    Redoing gender, redoing family: A mixed-methods examination of family complexity and gender heterogeneity among transgender families
    (2020) Allen, Samuel H.; Leslie, Leigh A; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Scholars have documented that considerable health disparities exist between transgender persons and the general population. A growing research base suggests that the family environment of trans individuals—i.e., the social climate within one’s family—can have a significant influence on the population’s health and wellbeing. Despite the substantiated relationship between the family environment of transgender people and their health, there are three identifiable gaps in the literature that warrant further research. First, no known quantitative studies have considered trans family environments beyond those that are accepting and rejecting, or how such family environments might be differently related to the population’s mental and physical health. Second, though scholars are increasingly recognizing the existence of gender heterogeneity within the trans population, it remains unknown if the health and family environment vary for trans persons of different gender identities. A third gap exists within the nascent literature on individuals with nonbinary gender identities in which there is an absence of studies examining the experiences of their family members. The three papers that comprise this mixed-methods dissertation respond to the aforementioned gaps in the literature. The first two studies analyze quantitative survey data collected from transgender adults (N=873); study three analyzes qualitative interview data collected from the parents of adult children with nonbinary gender identities (N=14). Study one examines family environment heterogeneity and tests its association with mental and physical health. Study two assesses variation in mental health, physical health, and family environment as a function of having a binary vs. a nonbinary gender identity. Study three uncovers how parents of nonbinary adult children make sense of their child’s gender and the developmental processes that occur in doing so. Taken together, findings from this dissertation offer important implications for healthcare providers, clinicians, and intervention efforts aimed at improving the health of transgender populations.
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    The Effect of Perceived Social Support on Client Attendance in Individual Therapy
    (2011) Northey, Sarah Spencer; Leslie, Leigh; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There is an abundance of research that seeks to understand what affects client attendance in therapy. Many of the most recent studies have begun to look at how relationship factors, such as the client and therapist bond affect client retention in therapy. This study aimed to understand how perceived social support from friends and family might make an impact on client attendance. Additionally the effect of gender was observed to look at how it might moderate the effect of perceived social support on client attendance. No significant results were found to indicate that perceived social support from friends or from family has an effect on client attendance. Gender, as well, did not have a significant impact on client attendance. Future research is proposed to better understand patterns of client attendance in therapy as well as the role of social support in therapy.
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    Exercising Social Class Privilege: Examining the Practices and Processes Defining Upper-Middle Class Swimming Club Culture
    (2010) DeLuca, Jaime; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu argues that social class is defined by the interplay and operation of various forms of capital and, as such, is thought to be a significant determinant of an individual's everyday experiences, understandings, and identities. He believes that participation in private sport communities, such as swimming clubs, can contribute to one's social standing by positioning "the body-for-others," distinguishing those maintaining a privileged lifestyle, and transferring valuable skills, characteristics, and social connections to children for the purposes of class reproduction (Bourdieu, 1978, p. 838). Drawing on these ideas, this research explores the inter-related social constructs of the physically active swimming body, family, and social class at the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club (a pseudonym), a private recreational swim club in an upper-middle class suburban town on the outskirts of a major mid-Atlantic city. Through four years of ethnographic engagement, including participatory lived experience, observations, and interviews with mothers and children who belong to the pool, this project examines the way in which membership at Valley View plays an integral role in daily and family lives. Invoking Bourdieu (1978, 1984, 1986), I argue that pool participation is illustrative of members taken for granted, lived experience of power and privilege. Valley View operates as a distinctive consumption choice offering families a strategic opportunity to promote, demonstrate, convert, and transmit their varied levels of capital in and through their children, with the goal of expressing distinction now, and reproducing their familial social class position for future generations. Specifically, from the maternal perspective, this research discusses how the pool functions as a physical space for children's acquisition of physical capital and the tools to live a healthy, physically active lifestyle emblematic of social class position; details the way in which pool participation is a constitutive element of the upper-middle class family habitus, and thus offers parents an opportunity to teach their children valuable social and cultural dispositions; examines how Valley View provides children with enriching, intangible experiences characteristic of their class-based privilege; and lastly, explores how club membership is an important feature of these mother's privileged everyday daily lives.