Can Playing with the Dog Make Your Child Healthier?
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According to the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines, children should be active for at least an hour a day until the age of 17. Currently, two in three children in the country do not meet the minimum threshold to receive the health benefits of physical activity and avoid the consequences of inactivity, such as increased risk of chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and depression. Fortunately, Colleen Chase, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Kinesiology at UMass Amherst, is working on an innovative solution to this problem.
Chase’s dissertation project is called ‘KIDs’, which stands for “Kids Interacting with Dogs.” She is investigating the differences in physical activity that children of dog-owning families get, compared to children without dogs, as well as the mental and emotional impact of playing with their dog. “It’s really about as wholesome as it gets,” Chase says when describing her research, “and you get to help people, too.”
Chase’s work represents a niche area of research in the field of kinesiology. Instead of measuring only the physical health benefits of human-dog interactions, she aims to measure the impact on the overall quality of life, including the emotional, social, and cognitive dimensions. Chase attributes this unique research focus to her advisor, Dr. Katie Potter, who opened up this field of research when she started the Behavioral Medicine Lab at UMass. Now, Dr. Potter continues to develop it with a close-knit group of three researchers, which Chase describes as “a little team working through novel issues, small but mighty.” And they are mighty indeed—their output already includes several published articles and an article in The Boston Globe covering their research.
For the KIDs study in particular, Chase will focus on children of elementary school age. Around fifty children and their four-legged companions will spend a week wearing a bracelet that can track their physical activity through a built-in accelerometer. These bracelets also have a Bluetooth setup, so that the one on the child’s wrist and the one on the dog’s collar can detect when they are in proximity. These devices pick up the movement of the wearer throughout the day, and the data can then be analyzed to figure out the amount of physical activity that occurred, the intensity, the time of the day, and whether child and dog were active at the same time. The one thing that these devices do not track is the location of the wearer, which is particularly important given that the study participants are young children.
KIDs participants will get their bracelets in the mail, in a package that includes stickers to decorate them with. This is part of a strategy to lower the probability of kids losing them, though that is always a risk in a study such as this one—in another study ran by Dr. Potter, a dog actually ate one of the devices (both dog and device were fine!). To track the emotional and mental health impact of activity with dogs, participants and their parents will fill out a survey every night, which includes questions about the participants’ emotions and levels of well-being.
To diversify their participant pool as much as possible, the KIDs study can be completed remotely. This is an intentional departure from previous studies, where participants had to report to the lab in person. “This restricted us to working with families in the Amherst area, which tend to have a certain socioeconomic status,” Chase explains. “That can be a confounding factor, because in wealthier families the increased physical activity might be unrelated to the presence of the dog. For example, it could be that their house has a yard where the child can play and run around.” Studying a more economically and racially diverse sample, then, is one way that the team is working to improve their methodology and do better science.
Chase has high hopes for the potential impact of her research. Having grown up with her dog Digger, and surrounded by cats, chickens, and other animals, Chase herself has plenty of first-hand experience with the positive impact of human-animal interaction. Now, she aims to leverage the insights of her research to help eliminate barriers to pet ownership, which prevent certain groups from experiencing the health benefits associated with human-dog interaction.
Chase believes that her research could be used to formally make the case for community interventions such as dog-walking programs, in-school pet programs, lifting pet rental restrictions, or even direct economic assistance for pet owners. “There are limitless possibilities where this could head,” she says, “and a host of unexplored benefits that could come with it.”
And, although KIDs is focused on dog-human interaction, Chase’s ambitions do not end there. When asked about what the future holds after this study, she has a ready answer: “We just applied for a grant for a cat-walking study focused on older adults.”
This goes to show that her research is fueled by the desire to improve people’s lives, and by the belief that everyone stands to benefit from playing with their dog or taking their cat for a walk around the block.
Written by Marina Perez del Valle, PhD student in Philosophy, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.