Data and program evaluations are used to inform critical decisions that impact participants, staff, and stakeholders. I understand the importance of collecting and evaluating valuable data. Hence, I aim to have open communication with program leaders and stakeholders, so that I can incorporate their insights into the evaluation itself. Gathering feedback from others allows me to create high-quality evaluations that will directly help determine crucial decisions.
Furthermore, I always aim for a quick turnaround and clear visualized findings when working with program staff and my own team. Time seemingly flies by, and thus, programs often have tight timeframes for data collection, evaluations, and interventions. I am committed to promoting health and well-being through research, data collection, and evaluation.
To see an example of an evaluation report I have created, click this hyperlink here. This evaluation report is about school recess.
Recess is an important opportunity for child development. Recess is generally the only unstructured time during the school day where children can focus on play, fun, and socialization. Children have valuable perspectives of recess, which can totally be used to inform recess itself!
However, when it comes to recess, adults have significantly more decision making power around recess than children. Recess is for children, but adults make all the decisions. How can we get children more involved? Can we ask their opinions?
2PLAY lab sought to explore children’s perceptions and recommendations for improving recess. We then made an effort to translate findings into practical solutions that can be used by schools.
We went to four public elementary schools in three rural school districts in the Pacific Northwest. These schools serve mostly White and Latinx families in low-to-middle income brackets. We held 17 focus groups, and 89 elementary students in 2nd through 5th grade volunteered to participate. They shared their valuable opinions of recess.
Following data collection, a content analysis was conducted. Two themes were developed that highlighted important areas of dissonance.
First, while recess was coded as a place of socialization, this included both positive (i.e., friendships) and negative (i.e., bullying, exclusion) socializing influences.
Second, while children discussed a need for rules and rule enforcement at recess, they often did not understand the reasoning behind rules and recognized different adults enforced varying rules.
To help alleviate these areas of dissonance, children made recommendations for improving recess:
Children want more access to recess (i.e., more frequent and longer recess periods)
They want more inclusive and nontraditional recess activities — like drawing and board games
They ask for boundaries between areas of the playground
Students want to use their voice to help shaping the rules that govern recess
They also want consistent adult implementation of those rules
Overall, the focus groups show that children are aware of both the problems and solutions relating to recess. Their perspectives can provide valuable insight during intervention planning.
This work included the help of the following 2PLAY lab members: Janelle K. Thalken, Isabella Ozenbaugh, Maya Trajkovski, Alexandra Szarabajko, & William V. Massey
To best support girls with a history of trauma, sport coaches should consider and include principles of trauma-informed in their practices when possible.
Eight core principles of trauma-informed programming include:
Opportunities for girls to make meaningful contributions
Established code of behavior
Evidence of positive traditions
Opportunities to opt in or out
Coaching in pairs
Body & brain-based warm-ups / cool-downs
Repetition of practice
Modified competition
(1) Coaches can offer multiple opportunities for girls to make meaningful contributions during practice. By doing so, the coach teaches her athletes the value of beyond-the-self actions for the betterment of team and community. This enables the athlete to feel connected and empowered in social situations.
(2) Establishing a clear and collaborative code of behavior promotes consistent conduct, such as the prosocial treatment of teammates, referees, and opponents.
(3) Evidence of positive traditions — such as coming up with team names, team cheers, or supporting teammates — can establish a team’s code of behavior.
(4) Coaches can also explicitly offer opportunities to opt out or in of a particular activity. When opt outs are built into sports practice, girls make autonomous decisions and only participate in situations that feel most comfortable to them. This is good practice for voicing their opinion and being independent in other aspects of their current life (e.g., negative peer pressure at school) or future life (e.g., toxic work situations or potentially unhealthy romantic relationships).
(5) Given that girls can opt out, adults should aim to coach in at least groups of two. This would increase the coaching staff’s capability and availability to provide individual support to athletes – such that one coach could continue to lead an activity, while the other attends to girls who have elected to not participate.
(6) Practices can be strengthened by incorporating body and brain-based warm-up and cool-down activities. This can help girls be in tune with their bodies and learn self-awareness.
(7) Coaches can build in the repetition of skills across activities within modules. Repetitive activities helps youth self-regulate.
(8) Modifications in competition should be included whenever possible. Girls are still building their athletic skills. Competition can be scaffolded to meet their developing needs and budding skills.
(!) The valuable components of trauma-informed programming help not just girls with a history. All girls on the team benefit when practice is trauma-informed!
My colleague Alex Szarabajko and I presented at the virtual SHAPE (Society of Health and Physical Educators) 2021 conference.
The co-researchers are William V. Massey, Janelle K. Thalken, and Sean P. Mullen.
Video from SHAPE 2021 Conference
Enjoying recess as a child predicted how much you enjoyed physical activity later as an adult. Being excluded during recess as a child was associated with being socially isolated as an adult.
Essentially, if you experienced social exclusion within a physical activity as a child, it is possible that you do not enjoy or engage in physical activity later as an adult.
This study supports similar research which found that being picked last in PE (Physical Education) or not enjoying PE as a child was related to being less active later in life (Cardinal et al., 2013; Ladwig et al., 2018).
The research publication can be found in the academic journal entitled Psychology of Sport and Exercise. Authors are William V. Massey, Alexandra Szarabajko, Janelle K. Thalken, Deanna Perez, and Sean P. Mullen.
The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life
Author: Bill Damon, PhD
Bill Damon recognizes purpose in life applies not just to adults — but also to adolescents.
What exactly is meant by purpose?
Purpose is “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.”
Some young people have a sense of purpose — in that they can express a clear vision of where they want to go, what they want to accomplish in life, and why. But most do not have a sense of purpose or even a sense of direction for their life. Exemplar cases of young people with a sense of purpose are showcased, and the common themes among these exemplars are highlighted. Parents, societies, and communities can help cultivate a sense of purpose in young people.
The strength of The Path to Purpose lies in its description of how parents can help their own children cultivate a sense of purpose.
The book did not adequately address how parents in lower income brackets (whom may be too busy themselves working) can adequately support their children and help them find their purposes in life. This was, in my opinion, a weakness of this book.
Damon shows that cultivating purpose is at the core of how adults can support adolescents and help them thrive. The book is easy to follow, and provides clear, tangible advice.
Overall, this book is highly recommended to parents, educators, coaches, clergy, or anyone with a vested interest in the development of children.
If you have a spreadsheet of addresses, you may want to extrapolate relevant US 2010 Census information.
I had ~475 addresses and was not sure about the best way go about it.
Luckily, I stumbled upon a really helpful website created by Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou. In it, they talk about how to bulk Geocode your addresses using data from the 2010 US Census. Ilya’s GitHub page also houses this information.
Essentially, they wrote a script for GoogleSheets. The script can geocode your US addresses into latitude, longitude, GeoID, and census tract – so helpful!
If you would like to use this feature, you need to first make a copy of their Google Sheet template. Go to ‘File’ > ‘Make a Copy to your Google Drive.’
Second, you will copy and paste your US addresses into column A.
Third, you will select columns A-H and select the Geocoder menu: US Census 2010 Geographies.
Next, the script may ask for your permission to run. Wait a bit for the script to run; this could take a while depending on how many addresses you have. Then….
Voilà! Now, your spreadsheet has addresses in column A, and GeoID and Census tract in columns G and H.
P.S. The other option is run a batch of addresses through the official US Census Geocoder website. That website can be found here. You do need to clean up your data first. The website usually worked for me, but sometimes did not.
Converting the address to latitude and longitude is known as geocoding. Whereas, converting the latitude and longitude to an address is called reverse geocoding.
Because I am probably not the only person who would like to reverse geocode a dataset, I thought it would be helpful to share my own reverse geocoding process.
Ideally, the dataset would first be in a csv file– with latitude was in one column and longitude in another.
Here is a link to an open, public Google Sheet Template that I created. Feel free to make a copy of it, and then edit it to fit your own needs!
ThisGoogle Sheet will provide the address when given the latitude and longitude. The following is the formula: “=reverse_geocode(A1,B1).”
Otherwise, you can copy and paste the script yourself into the ‘<> Script editor’ portion of your Google Sheet (under ‘Tools’). Script is below:
function reverse_geocode(lat,lng) { Utilities.sleep(1500);
var response = Maps.newGeocoder().reverseGeocode(lat,lng); for (var i = 0; i < response.results.length; i++) { var result = response.results[i]; Logger.log('%s: %s, %s', result.formatted_address, result.geometry.location.lat, result.geometry.location.lng); return result.formatted_address; } }
I am learning the foundations of qualitative and mixed-methods research.
Ethics always guide my decision making. I recognize how research is embedded in culture. I aim for my research to include marginalized groups.
My end goal is not to simply create knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Rather, I hope that the knowledge I can help co-create will be applied in real word settings.
Through my research, I hope to effect positive change — especially for people of color and those from low income neighborhoods.
