Master's Thesis

My master's thesis began as an opportunity for part-time summer employment after I received by undergraduate degree in the spring of 2013. With graduate school beginning in the fall, I assisted my major professor with research that she was conducting in collaboration with a professor from Auburn's School of Kinesiology. The work involved examining the effects that a food environment can have on childhood obesity rates in low socioeconomic groups. For example, poor food options around a child's home and school can lead to increased obesity rates, especially so among vulnerable populations susceptible to experiencing health inequalities. The manuscript was accepted by Child: Health, Care, and Development and can be found in the September 2015 issue (doi:10.1111/cch.12204).

For my thesis work, I was fortunate to be able to build off the work and methods that had already been implemented by my advisors. In order to more comprehensively illustrate how an environment can affect children's health, I included measures that also take into consideration the availability for children to participate in physical activity. Together, both the food environment and the physical activity environment combine to form a complex built environment by which we can attempt to understand obesity rates in low socioeconomic groups, specifically children from the Black Belt Region of Alabama.

I defended my thesis in March 2015, capping off what has been one of the most beneficial experiences of my life. My dedication to this project has enhanced the way I view public health, using spatial science as a lens by which to view health inequalities. Below, you will find the abstract for my thesis. If you would like to view a copy of the thesis in its entirety, please follow the link to the right.

Thesis

Socioeconomic Disparities, Community Physical Environment, and Childhood Obesity in Alabama’s Black Belt Region

Health inequalities have been linked to socioeconomic disparities. These disparities are communal differences which have a profound influence on the physical environment. Scholarship has recently connected socioeconomic disparities with obesity, a current epidemic in many nations that disproportionately affects those from racial and ethnic minority groups as well as those from a lower socioeconomic status. The issue is particularly important in the Black Belt region of the rural South, where counties are characterized by high percentages of African American population and prominent rates of poverty. Community physical environments can influence obesity rates through two components, the food environment and the physical activity environment. Both of these have an equally important impact on the health of a community, as the former describes energy intake while the latter describes energy expenditure. This research aims to focus on an understudied population, children from rural Black Belt counties, in order to evaluate obesity rates in relation to the surrounding physical environment. 664 children from five elementary schools in two Black Belt counties were analyzed to more comprehensively understand obesity among children in the rural Black Belt. This was accomplished through the use of mixed methods, quantitative measurements acquired through GIS techniques and statistical analysis and qualitative measures derived from survey questionnaires and spatial video recordings of the physical environment.