Supporting the healthy development of rural children: an ecologically based investigation of barriers and facilitators identified by early years caregivers in the promotion of physical activity and healthy eating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physical activity and healthy eating are key components of healthy living, and they reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases.Current research indicates that Canadian early years children are not active enough for healthy growth and development.Additionally their diets are high in processed foods and lack fresh and locally grown foods.Parents play a key role in establishing healthy behaviours; however caregivers also have a strong influence, as many early years children spend a large portion on their day in care centres.To date, very little is known about the factors influencing rural caregivers in the provision of healthy opportunities for early years children in their care.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an ecological framework to identify facilitators and barriers that rural caregivers face when providing physical activity and healthy eating opportunities in care centres.Methods: Caregivers (N = 8) in rural settings participated in one on one semi-structured interviews.Perceived facilitators and barriers reported by caregivers were categorized using the ecological model as (intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy).Results: Caregivers identified facilitators and barriers.(i.e., personal health and wellness, caregiver perceptions of lack of parental knowledge, parental support and access to facilities and local foods in the community), that influenced their ability to provide physical activity and healthy eating opportunities for children in their care.Similar barriers and facilitators were clustered together to create themes within each ecological category.A total of 12 key themes emerged from the data.Conclusion: Rural caregivers identified a number of factors that facilitated and inhibited their ability to provide opportunities for engaging in health promoting behaviours.Interestingly caregivers did not identify any intrapersonal barriers.Factors in the interpersonal category were the most commonly reported.Thus behaviours of others were the often indicated as a key factor influencing caregivers in the Perceptions of Rural Caregivers v provision of healthy opportunities.In the institutional and community categories caregivers identified a number of facilitators that supported them in the provision of healthy opportunities.Additionally, some caregivers discussed practices they used to overcome barriers and this in turn, facilitated the promotion of physical activity and healthy eating within the care centres.Research in rural areas is limited and the majority of studies focus the barriers to living in rural areas.This study contributes to the literature because it identified, not only challenges, but also benefits to living in rural areas.Furthermore, the use of an ecological framework allowed barriers and facilitators to be classified into distinct categories.This is important, as classification of specific factors can aid in designing initiatives that target facilitators and alleviate barriers.Such initiatives can then support early years caregivers in the provision of healthy opportunities for children.In turn, this will aid Canadian early years children in establishing lifelong physical activity eating and healthy eating patterns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".