Using an ecological approach to examine the influence of school environment upon physical activity involvement in middle school students.

摘要

An ecological approach to health promotion recognizes that persons are nested within different layers of influence that will impact their health behaviours and lifestyle opportunities. These influences are represented by life settings (e.g., workplace, home, school) and relationships (e.g., with employers, family, teachers). Using an ecological approach throughout this thesis, I sought to investigate multilevel influences on middle school student physical activity. Four manuscripts are included in the thesis. The first manuscript presents a method that enables health promotion practitioners to ensure a high degree of ecological integration in intervention programs during the program planning phase. Specifically, this paper illustrates how a framework developed by Richard, Potvin, Kishchuk, Prilic, and Green (1996) can be applied to formative data to facilitate the translation of ecological constructs into intervention strategies to inform program planning.;Settings represent another critical consideration for practitioners striving to enhance the 'ecologicalness' of health promotion programs. To address the need for adequate measures of the school environment, the third manuscript presents the development of a psychometrically sound questionnaire assessing students' perceptions of their school physical activity environment (Q-SPACE).;Finally, when using an ecological approach, multilevel modeling techniques are recommended to analyze nested data structures (e.g., students within schools). Thus, in the fourth manuscript the multilevel influence of both individual and school-level predictors of student physical was investigated using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The main fording from this study is that student physical activity varies significantly across schools.;This thesis offers additional support for the importance of using an ecological approach to understand and promote physical activity in middle school students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.;Given that policy represents an important and often neglected target for the promotion of physical activity, the second manuscript demonstrates how Hogwood and Gunn's (1984) policy implementation framework was applied to the 2005 Ontario Ministry of Education's Daily Physical Activity policy implementation strategy. This application allowed us to identify potential strengths of and gaps in the current policy implementation plan.