The long-term goals of my research program are to develop, test, and disseminate successful intervention programs that work at multiple levels of influence to increase youth physical activity and decrease screen media use, leading to long-term improvements in physical, social, and mental health. To accomplish these long-term goals, my research embraces the Social Ecological Model as a framework to better understand the multiple levels of influence on youth physical activity and sedentary behavior. One facet of my research program is to better understand the social and physical environmental influences on youth physical activity and sedentary behavior. At the heart of the Social-Ecological Model are an individual’s behaviors and their health outcomes. Therefore, another integral facet of my research program is to better understand how to quantify physical activity and sedentary behavior in youth. We use research-grade accelerometers (i.e., motion sensors) coupled with regression and machine-learning models to objectively quantify frequency, intensity, and timing of physical activity and inactivity but also rely on questionnaire data, when appropriate, to assess relevant contextual information.

The overall goal is to extend our recently completed Food, Activity, Screens, and Teens (FAST) Study. An NIH R03 application will support analysis and modeling of data from the FAST Study, completing core work that was interrupted by the COVID closure and taking advantage of the new opportunistic data collected after 2020; outside the scope of the original project. The aim of the R03 is to leverage our existing data to investigate the long-term impact of the pandemic closure and social distancing guidelines on social relationships, health behavior, and health outcomes for disadvantaged urban adolescents. We would also move beyond the school to incorporate neighborhood and community features related to physical activity and food access. The R03 would generate deliverables as pilot work for a planned NIH R01 competitive renewal submission. The planned NIH R01 application (Multi PD/PI: Kitts and Sirard) will build off the work from our previous R01, and the planned R03 grant. The main aim will be to design a full-scale follow up study that delivers a school-based health behavior intervention that incorporates important social network processes identified in our previous project and to deliver that intervention to a larger and broader range of schools (urban, suburban, and rural). Lastly, Dr. Sirard will contribute to a related NSF RAPID application (PI: Kitts). The RAPID grant project aims to capitalize on a unique one-time opportunity to collect follow-up data, using both survey and anthropometric measures of our original FAST Study participants (who we recruited in the 6th grade) during their senior year of high school.