KAMLOOPS – Researchers at the Centre for Early Education and Development Studies (CEEDS), created at TRU by its Canada Research Chair in Early Childhood Education, have received two grants to study children’s health and development.
Canada Research Chair Dr. Amedeo D’Angiulli is the principal researcher for a project that received $293,371 over three years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to study trajectories of vulnerability regarding children’s health and development. The project will explore the various developmental pathways that Canadian children follow, leading either to good health and well-being or to poor health and unfavourable academic outcomes, and to understand the factors that influence those pathways and lead to inequities.
“The study will involve the entire population of children enrolled in public school districts in BC,” explained D’Angiulli. “Although this is a study focused on BC, it will have important implications for Canada in general.”
The study will use anonymous administrative data available from the health and education sectors in British Columbia; and will link these with census data describing the children’s neighbourhood conditions.
“The proposed study challenges current research thinking about health and developmental trajectories, and will explore relatively novel research methods and new ways of sharing findings with policymakers and community members,” said D’Angiulli.
“We anticipate that the results of this research program will influence policies and programs related to early childhood conditions that impact school readiness, and the ways in which schools accommodate children with varying levels of health or school readiness in order to reduce children’s vulnerability to future disparities,” he added.
Dr. Stefania Maggi, Associate Director of CEEDS, has just received a career award of $480,000 over six years and an operating grant of $75,000 over two years from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research to study psychosocial determinants of adolescent health behaviour.
Maggi, who has studied adolescent smoking and drinking for the past 10 years, will identify and describe the mechanisms and factors that seem to predispose youth to smoke, drink, and take drugs.
“Behaviours such as smoking, alcohol or drug use, and sedentary lifestyles become apparent in adolescence and tend to predict long-lasting adult habits and lifestyles,” she explained.
“My doctoral work suggests that there are early predictors of adolescent substance abuse that can be observed at a young age, years before the health behaviours have become measurable,” said Maggi.
“Some experts have argued that to increase the potential for success of prevention and intervention programs, these programs need to be targeted to a much younger audience,” she said. “Although health behaviours may be consolidated during adolescence, theorists have suggested that they are acquired over a long period of time, prior to the adolescent years and during the critical developmental years spanning birth to late childhood.”
The results of Maggi’s study will likely be of interest to education and health policy-makers and practitioners across the globe; locally, she said, “Thanks to the established partnership between CEEDS and the KAMLOOPS – Thompson School District #73, I have continuous opportunities to communicate the results of my research promptly and to translate it in recommendations that are meaningful for the school district, and each individual school.”
For more information, please contact:
Amedeo D’Angiulli at 250.828.8734 or by email.
Stefania Maggi at 250.828.8765 or by email.
For background info visit the CEEDS website.
