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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Item 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 DWe 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.Item 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.Item "That Chart Ain't For Us": An Examination of Black Women's Understandings of BMI, Health, and Physical Activity(2019) Thompson, Tori; Jette, Shannon; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Significantly, black women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared to other groups in the United States, with 60% being classified as obese per the BMI (CDC, 2017). However, there is currently a lack of scholarship which examines black women’s perceptions of the BMI, and how/if those perceptions influence their attitudes toward health and physical activity. In this project, I take a Foucauldian approach to analyze data collected from eight semi-structured interviews with black women who self- identify as obese and who are physically active. Findings suggest that black women find the BMI to be irrelevant to their health and well-being, and do not attribute their engagement in physical activity to their BMI. Instead, their reasons for partaking in physical activity are due to their individual experiences understandings of health and black female identity. These results have the potential to inform healthcare policies, physician practice, and public health interventions that target communities of color.Item Acts of Livelihood: Bodies and Nature in International Garden City Movement Planning, 1898-1937(2018) Clevenger, Samuel Martin; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Urban planning and reform scholars and policymakers continue to cite the “garden city” community model as a potential blueprint for planning environmentally sustainable, economically equitable, humane built environments. Articulated by the British social reformer Sir Ebenezer Howard and his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the model represented a method for uniting the benefits of town and country through a singular, pre-planned, “healthy” community, balancing spaces of “countryside” and “nature” with affordable, well-built housing and plentiful cultural attractions associated with city life. The book catalyzed an early twentieth-century international movement for the promotion and construction of garden cities. Howard’s garden city remains a highly influential context in the history of town planning and urban public health reform, as well as more recent environmentally-friendly urban design movements. To date, while historians have long examined the garden city as an agent of social and spatial reform, little analysis has been devoted to the role of prescribed embodiment and deemed “healthy” physical cultural forms and practices in the promotion and construction of garden cities as planned communities for “healthy living.” Informed by recent scholarship in Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), embodied environmental history, cultural materialism, and theories of modern biopower, this dissertation studies the cultural history of international garden city movement planning in early twentieth century Britain and the United States. Studying archival materials related to some of the prominent planners and resultant communities of the movement, I focus on the biopolitical dimensions of the planners’ contextual designs for “nature,” “health,” and “healthy” physical culture as they devised material garden city community layouts. I argue that the intentional British and American garden cities created during the movement were planned as spatialized strategies for the regeneration of laboring bodies through organized, bourgeois physical cultural practices and access to nostalgic spaces of “naturally healthy environments and outdoor recreation.Item 'Being on Top of It:' A Qualitative Examination of the Processes and Contexts Shaping Pediatric Caregiving among Low-Income, Young, African-American Fathers.(2015) Waters, Damian M.; Roy, Kevin M; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Several studies have noted the positive relationship between father involvement and children's health outcomes (Stewart & Menning, 2009; Bronke-Tinkew, Horowitz, Scott, 2009; Yogman, Kidlon, & Earls, 1995; Lamb, 1997; Dubowitz, Black, & Cox, 2001; Chenning 2008). Recent years have also seen a growing interest in the impact of adolescent fathers' characteristics and involvement on children's outcomes (Black, Dubowitz, & Starr, 1999; Fletcher & Wolfe, 2011). Few studies of public health or pediatric outcomes, however, have examined how fathers provide and shape healthcare for their children. Through semi-structured interviews (n = 29), this study explored how low-income, minority young men care for their children's health. Participants were recruited from two programs that provide integrative medical care, mental health services, and case management support for adolescent and young adult parents in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and entered into Atlas.ti (Friese, 2014). Informed by grounded theory, data were analyzed over three phases of coding. This study explored how the contexts in which young men fathered facilitated and complicated fathers' involvement in pediatric caregiving. These contexts included young men's relationships with the mothers of their children, family and kin-relationships, socioeconomic circumstances, community contexts, as well as proximity and distance from their children. This study found that young men developed their approaches to pediatric caregiving from their general health knowledge, prior caregiving experiences, personal health histories as well as their intimate familiarity with their children. Taken together, the findings suggested a tripartite framework for describing fathers' involvement in pediatric caregiving. This framework also highlights common processes--constructing self as caregiver and a father, navigating coparent relationships, and engaging in medical visits--that young men used to engage in preventative, acute, and chronic caregiving. These common processes helped men negotiate contexts that often challenged their involvement in pediatric caregiving.Item Cycling the City: Locating Cycling in the Continued (Re)Structuring of North American Cities(2014) Rick, Oliver James Collard; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bicycling is a growing mobility practice within contemporary U.S. cities that has multiple effects on the formation of the urban as “We are surrounded by cycling” (Horton et al, 2007, p. 1). This project investigates how cycling has shaped the city by analyzing the role that the governance and practice of cycling currently plays in the political, economic, social, spatial, and affective re-formation of the urban. Through the use of a combination of methods, working at various levels of analysis, the aim is to locate the impact of cycling policies and practices on the structural, discursive, and embodied dimensions of contemporary urban (re)structuring. It is an analysis of macro political processes, the formation of cycling communities, and the experiential dimension of riding in the city. Latham & McCormack (2010) state “cities are constantly generating new forms of collective life, novel ways of being together” (p.55). Thus, this project interrogates the various ways in which cycling impacts upon cities, and influences their (re)formation in potentially “historically unprecedented ways” (Wachsmuth et al, 2011, p. 741). Through studying cycling in Boston, Baltimore, and Washington DC this project provides a multi-sited analysis of how cycling is positioned within U.S. cities currently, as well as the complex and diverse processes that inform the contemporary organization of these urban spaces. U.S. cities currently exist within a broad “climate of cuts, austerity and state retrenchment” (Newman, 2013, p. 1) that has defined current patterns of urban governance. I have researched the ways in which cycling has underpinned and simultaneously challenged these broad shifts toward neoliberal governance. Cycling is both drawn into “marketing of urban “culture” and history by entrepreneurial governance” (Cherot and Murray, 2002, p. 432), but also underpins cities as entities that “defy efforts to be classified into types, reduced to essential characteristics, and fixed by boundaries (intellectual or otherwise)” (Prytherch, 2002, p. 772). As such this project investigates this simultaneously overlapping and contradictory impact of cycling on the city, mapping the multiple locations of cycling within the perpetual (re)formation of the urban.