Process evaluation of a community-based intervention program: Healthy Youth Healthy Communities, an adolescent obesity prevention project in Fiji

Nearly one-half of the adult population in Fiji between the ages of 15–64 years is either overweight or obese; and rates amongst school children have, on average, doubled during the last decade. There is an urgent need to scale up the promotion of healthy behaviors and environments using a multi-sectoral approach. The Healthy Youth Healthy Community (HYHC) project in Fiji used a settings approach in secondary schools and faith-based organizations to increase the capacity of the whole community, including churches, mosques and temples, to promote healthy eating and regular physical activity, and to prevent unhealthy weight gain in adolescents aged 13–18 years. The team consisted of a study manager, project coordinator and four research assistants (RAs) committed to planning, designing and facilitating the implementation of intervention programs in collaboration with other stakeholders, such as the wider school communities, government and non-governmental organizations and business partners. Process data were collected on all intervention activities and analyzed by dose, frequency and reach for each specific strategy. The Fiji Action Plan included nine objectives for the school settings; four were based on nutrition and two on physical activity in schools, plus three general objectives, namely capacity building, social marketing and evaluation. Long-term change in nutritional behavior was difficult to achieve; a key contributor to this was the unhealthy food served in the school canteens. Whilst capacity-building proved to be one of the best mechanisms for intervening, it is important to consider the cultural and social factors influencing health behaviors and affecting specific groups.

Longitudinal surveys of Australian youth : active citizenship and the secondary school experience : community participation rates of Australian youth

LSAY is a research program that follows young Australians as they move through secondary school, into further education or training, and into the labour market and adult life. This website provides access to the electronic full text versions of LSAY research reports, from 1996 to present.

Body weight, body image, and eating behaviours : relationships with ethnicity and acculturation in a community sample of young Australian women

A study was conducted to investigate associations between ethnicity and acculturation status and risk factors for eating disorders among young adult women. A community sample of 14,779 women aged 18–23 completed a comprehensive mail-out survey, which incorporated questions on country of birth, length of time spent in Australia, body weight, weight dissatisfaction, dieting, binge eating, and compensatory disordered eating behaviours. Results showed that risk factors for eating disorders were present across a range of ethnic groups. Further, a strong acculturation effect was observed, such that the longer the time spent in Australia, the more women reported weight-related values and behaviours similar to those of Australian-born women. Results challenge claims that risk factors for disordered eating are restricted to Caucasian females in Western societies. Implications for understanding ethnic and sociocultural influences on body weight, dieting, and disordered eating are considered.

Mentoring programs for indigenous youth at-risk

There is a range of risk factors that may make young people of any ethnicity more likely to engage in antisocial behaviours. These factors include the young person’s own attitudes; relationships within the family; and growing up in communities where there is widespread violence, alcohol and other substance abuse, poverty, poor health and poor-quality housing. Indigenous young people face the additional challenges ofdispossession, discontinuity of culture and intergenerational trauma.A strong connection to culture—coupled with high self-esteem, a strong sense of autonomy, and with living in cohesive, functioning families and communities—can be protective factors that result in Indigenous young people choosing productive life pathways.Mentoring is a relationship intervention strategy that can assist in building some of these protective factors. A growing body of research demonstrates that mentoring can have powerful and lasting positive effects in improving behavioural, academic and vocational outcomes for at-risk youth and, to a more limited extent, in reducing contact with juvenile justice systems.In an Indigenous context, mentoring is a particularly promising initiative because it fits well with Indigenous teaching and learning styles and can help to build strong collective ties within a community.Mentoring programs can involve adult or peer mentors and can be implemented in a range of ways, such as one-on-one or in groups.Although positive results can be achieved with single-intervention mentoring for at risk youth, integrating mentoring into broader programs produces a greater level of positive change.The way the mentoring program is run and the nature of the relationship between mentor and mentee are crucial in determining the outcomes of youth mentoring programs.

Rural youth education and support program: the Casterton experience

Young people's lives have been directly and indirectly affected by the dynamics of decline in rural Australia. In early 1999, the Casterton region experienced the suicides of two young people. These events led to the funding of a rural youth education and support program at the town's secondary college. The program adopts a multi-layered approach to reduce risk factors and strengthen the protective factors amongst students at the college through the enhancement of social connectedness, personal safety and freedom, and educational participation. The program provides interventions at the individual, school and community levels through case management, the delivery of group programs and opportunities for community participation. This approach recognises the importance of early intervention and a holistic approach to health and well-being in the student population. This paper provides an overview and preliminary evaluation of the program undertaken in 2002.

Structural deficiency or cultural racism: the educational and social experiences of Arab-Australian youth

This paper discusses the cultural, attitudinal and structural factors that impact upon the social experiences and educational achievements of Arabic-speaking background (ASB) students in three Melbourne secondary schools with high levels of cultural and linguistic diversity. The paper makes the case for and then outlines a multidimensional approach to multicultural education to better integrate ASB students and their families into the schooling environment. Key strategies developed and tested include a model of school-community partnership, online and interactive teacher support material (TSM) as well as on-going teacher professional development workshops on reflexive approaches to cultural diversity and intercultural tension.

The BEST plus approach to assisting families recover from youth substance problems

The Best plus program is a whole-of-family therapy option for families to address not only youth substance abuse issues, but also challenging and antisocial adolescent behaviours. It uses an evidence-based strategy that can be implemented widely in the community, and is proving to be a popular and relevant framework for professionals to engage and assist families in reducing adolescent problem behaviours. Evaluations indicate that the program is an effective forum for parents and siblings of adolescent drug abusers to redevelop positive family environments that encourage responsible behaviour and recovery from drug abuse.

Race, ethnicity and education in globalized times

"This book broaches what has become a noisy silence whereby conversations about race and ethnic relationships are understood as unbalanced, irrelevant or as too dangerous to speak about. It is concerned with the ways that race and ethnic relationships are spoken about in contemporary western societies such as Australia and the changed and confused debates that underpin those discussions. Parents and teachers at one State secondary school in Melbourne, Australia speak about race and ethnic relationships as their school community is increasingly altered by globalising, technological and population change. Newspapers and public policy debates avoid discussions about race relationships even as discussions about national identity and direction are crucial themes. This book argues that race and ethnic relationships must be understood in new ways; that the analytical frameworks provided by constructivist thought and post-colonial writing must be interrogated to provide more comprehensive methodological resources to examine these relationships."

Durban+5 and beyond : locating and integrating youth perspective

The importance of engaging young people in protected areas and nature conservation has become an undisputed agenda for the international conservation community, but it remains a challenging one.This is an important agenda to assess as we attempt to reflect on the Durban World Park Congress and forsee the next steps. The paper traces the background of youth engagement within the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) It portrays youth as an innovative and diverse constituency with the critical knowledge to advance nature conservation in protected areas (PAs), highlighting the perceptions, visions and key messages of youth to global PA leaders.It identifies the key issuesin the discourse of engaging youth in protected ares and recommends concrete actions for the future