Although designated as a high-risk group during the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic, only about 40% of U.S. children received the vaccine, a relatively low percentage compared with high-risk groups in seasonal influenza, such as the elderly, whose vaccine rates typically top 70%. To better understand parental decision making and predictors of acceptance…

Childhood obesity remains a problem in the United States. Preschool teachers can help to attenuate it but need to have the confidence or self-efficacy to provide healthy practices. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to (a) develop and validate a preschool teacher self-efficacy tool to examine teachers' confidence in addressing the nutrition…

Purpose: Chances for a healthy life are not equally distributed across society. Instead, genetic, social, and environmental factors help determine the probability that a child will be healthy and active. We investigate the probability that youth will be physically active by examining 3 consistent correlates of physical activity. The individual and…

Objective: Determine relationships between self-efficacy, decisional balance, and processes of change and Stages of Change (SOC) related to fruit and vegetable (FV) availability among Hispanic Head Start parents. Design: A 2-phase descriptive study with mixed methodology. Setting: Two Head Start sites in a city in the midwestern United States.…

Higher rates of smoking initiation and continuation by female compared with male adolescents, as found in many developed countries, may call for gender-specific prevention programs. Risk factors of smoking initiation and continuation were examined prospectively (1997-2002) among 3205 Dutch elementary schoolchildren (mean age 11.64) in an…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the behavioral determinants of the initiation of breast-feeding at birth. The prospective cohort study used the attitude, social influence, self-efficacy (ASE) model in 373 pregnant women in five child health care centers. Prenatally, 72% of the women had the intention to breast-feed, and 73% actually started…

In this study, it was tested whether attitudes, self-efficacy, social influences and the perception of the school and home environments had different associations with intentions for adolescent non-smokers, occasional smokers and daily smokers. A regression model allowing for separate slopes of social-cognitive and environment variables accounted…

A large national study of schoolchildren aged 6-18 years was conducted to assess nutritional and socio-cognitive factors associated with body mass index (BMI). A questionnaire was used to assess nutritional quality of breakfast, importance of physical activity and food variety score, among 4441 students from randomly selected schools in all states…

The experience of long-term poverty affects many child outcomes, in part through a family stress process in which poverty is considered to be one of the major factors causing family dysfunction, depression among caregivers and inadequate parenting. Recent scholarship extends the classical Family Stress Model by researching the ways in which…