Publications
Childhood Obesity
 "Addressing the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity Through School-Based Interventions: What Has Been Done and Where Do We Go From Here?" Karen E. Peterson and Mary Kay Fox, Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, spring 2007. Schools are ideal settings for implementing programs to prevent and control childhood obesity. The authors review the evidence on the effectiveness of school-based interventions; offer suggestions for improvements based on the existing evidence, findings from related research, and recommendations from expert groups; and identify critical gaps in the existing body of research that future studies should address.
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School Nutrition Standards
 The school food environment plays an important role in children's food choices and eating habits. A new Institute of Medicine report, Nutrition Standards for Foods in Schools, is a resource on this issue for parents, state and federal agencies, educators, schools, and others. James Ohls, a retired senior fellow and area leader for food and nutrition policy, served on the committee that helped develop the report. The multidisciplinary committee reviewed and made recommendations on nutrition standards for the availability, sale, content, and consumption of foods and beverages at school, particularly foods and beverages offered in competition with federally reimbursable meals and snacks.
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Abstinence Education
 "Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs." Christopher Trenholm, Barbara Devaney, Ken Fortson, Lisa Quay, Justin Wheeler, and Melissa Clark, April 2007. Since fiscal year 1998, the Title V, Section 510 program has allocated $50 million annually in federal funding for programs that teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for school-age children. A new impact report from our congressionally mandated multiyear evaluation of four abstinence education programs finds that the programs had no effect on the sexual abstinence of youth. But it also finds that youth in these programs were no more likely to have unprotected sex, a concern that has been raised by some critics of these programs.
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Personal Health Records
 "Considerations in Designing Personal Health Records for Underserved Populations." Ann Bagchi, Lorenzo Moreno, and Raquel af Ursin, April 2007. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought the utility and importance of electronic, easily portable personal health records (PHRs) starkly to light in fall 2005. A new issue brief describes the role that PHRs—comprehensive paper- or electronic-based systems recording an individual's health-related information over time—can play in reducing health care disparities. The brief also looks at barriers to PHR adoption for underserved individuals and the implications of widespread use of PHRs. Based on focus groups conducted with individuals from medically underserved, low-income minority groups from New Brunswick, NJ, the brief suggests that a variety of outreach efforts may be needed by developers of PHR systems to overcome consumer mistrust before PHRs are accepted on a wider scale.
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AAPOR Conference
On May 16 to 20, our experts will be sharing their findings at the 67th annual American Association for Public Opinion Research conference, "Of Polls and Policy." Please join us to hear methods updates related to assessing preschoolers, conducting web-based surveys, using cell phones in survey research, surveying people with disabilities, and other topics. See a list of Mathematica presenters. Read more about the conference.
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