Publications by authors named "Teresia O'Connor"

TV viewing is associated with health risks, but existing measures of TV viewing are imprecise due to relying on self-report. We developed the Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home (FLASH)-TV, a machine learning pipeline with state-of-the-art computer vision methods to measure children's TV viewing. In three studies, lab pilot (n = 10), lab validation (n = 30), and home validation (n = 20), we tested the validity of FLASH-TV 3.

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Validated carotenoid assessment methods are needed to study infant carotenoid nutrition. This is a secondary analysis of repeated diet assessments of healthy participants collected at 4- (n = 21), 6- (n = 12), and 8- (n = 9) months of age in Houston, TX between April 2019 and June 2020. Intake was assessed with 3 assessment tools, analyzed with 3 nutrient databases, and underwent 3 adjustments to account for milk composition variability.

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Recruitment of research participants often has not obtained a desired sample size, thereby becoming a major problem inhibiting investigators' ability to adequately test the specified hypotheses. Social marketing with its four Ps, originally developed by the business world to sell products and adapted for public health initiatives, is proposed as a dynamic comprehensive conceptual framework to apply marketing principles and practices to enhance participant recruitment. Applying a social marketing approach to research recruitment would require initial investigation to understand the motivations of the target audience in regard to research participation, and continued research throughout the main project to adapt the recruitment efforts as limitations arise.

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Background: Digital health interventions are promising for reaching and engaging high-risk youth in disease prevention opportunities; however, few digital prevention interventions have been developed for Hispanic youth, limiting our knowledge of these strategies among this population.

Objective: This study qualitatively assessed the feasibility and acceptability of Fit24, a 12-week goal-setting intervention that uses a Fitbit watch (Fitbit Inc) and theoretically grounded SMS text messages to promote physical activity and sleep among Hispanic adolescents (aged between 14 and 16 years) with obesity.

Methods: After completing the intervention, a subsample of youth (N=15) participated in an in-depth interview.

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American Indian (AI) adolescents who practice healthy behaviors of sleep, nutrition, physical activity, and limited screen time can lower their lifetime risk of diet-sensitive disease. Little is known about how AI parenting practices influence the health behaviors of youth. The objective of this qualitative study was to explore how a group of AI parents of youths at risk of disease influenced their youth's health behaviors after a family intervention.

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Background: SMS text message-based interventions are a promising approach for reaching and engaging high-risk youths, such as Hispanic adolescents with obesity, in health promotion and disease prevention opportunities. This is particularly relevant, given that SMS text messaging is widely accessible and available and that adolescents are frequent texters. Including youths in the development of SMS text message content can lead to more acceptable and relevant messaging; however, few studies include this group as cocollaborators.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic affected home and work routines, which may exacerbate existing academic professional disparities. Objectives were to describe the impact of the pandemic on pediatric faculty's work productivity, identify groups at risk for widening inequities, and explore mitigation strategies.

Methods: A cross-sectional study of faculty members was conducted at nine U.

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Little is known about how parents combine multiple physical activity (PA) parenting practices (PAPP) and their relationship with their child's activity level. This study examined patterns of PAPP and their associations with sociodemographic characteristics and children's PA. Parents of 5- to 12-year-olds ( = 618) completed the 65-items PAPP item-bank assessing their use of structured, autonomy promoting, and controlling PAPP, and reported their child's PA.

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Purpose: To assess whether racial discrimination experienced at ages 18-21 years is associated with psychological distress and well-being, and investigate potential moderators of this relationship.

Methods: We used panel data collected from 2005 to 2017 from 661 participants in the Transition into Adulthood Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The Everyday Discrimination Scale measured racial discrimination.

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Objective: Accurate measurement of adult and child screen media use are needed to robustly assess its impact on health outcomes. Our objective was to systematically review screen media use measurement tools that have been validated against an objective "gold standard" tool.

Methods: The search strategy was initially conducted in Medline Ovid and translated to Embase, Web of Science, PsychInfo and Cochrane.

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Although parental feeding plays an important role in child eating and weight status, high food motivation among children may also be a factor shaping how feeding impacts child weight. This study explored whether individual differences in preschool children's food motivation interacted with mothers' feeding styles in predicting subsequent child weight status. Participants included 129 Hispanic Head Start mother/child dyads.

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Objective: The current study examined school-summer differences in children's sleep patterns and sleep hygiene. Cross-sectional relationships with children's sleep, sleep hygiene, and weight status were explored during the school year and summer.

Methods: Children (5-8 years) and their parents (n = 197 dyads) were recruited from 4 schools in southeastern Texas and via Facebook.

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Background: Poor physical activity (PA) and sleep behaviors in Hispanic adolescents contributes to increased risk for type 2 diabetes. Commonly owned digital devices and services like smartphones and text-messaging are highly used among adolescents and are promising intervention tools for reaching this age group. Personal activity trackers assess activity and sleep, making them ideal tools for addressing these behaviors.

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Parenting styles are a risk factor for adolescents overweight/obesity worldwide, but this association is not well understood in the context of Latin America. This study examines the association between the parenting styles of mothers and fathers and the risk of overweight/obesity among Costa Rican adolescents. Data are cross-sectional from a sample of adolescents (13-18 years old) enrolled in ten urban and eight rural schools ( = 18) in the province of San José, Costa Rica, in 2017.

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Fostering the growth, development, health, and wellbeing of children is a global priority. The early childhood period presents a critical window to influence lifelong trajectories, however urgent multisectoral action is needed to ensure that families are adequately supported to nurture their children's growth and development. With a shared vision to give every child the best start in life, thus helping them reach their full developmental potential, we have formed the International Healthy Eating Active Living Matters (HEALing Matters) Alliance.

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Background: Given that today's adolescents are digital front-runners, technology-based obesity prevention strategies are age-appropriate for this population. The use of remote and wireless technologies may be suitable for extending the reach and engagement of obesity prevention efforts among high-risk Hispanic youths, as this subgroup is disproportionately affected by barriers that limit participation in traditional, in-person interventions.

Objective: The purpose of this scoping review was to examine the intervention and sample characteristics of technology-based obesity prevention interventions among Hispanic adolescents.

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Background: There is a strong association between increased mobile device use and worse dietary habits, worse sleep outcomes, and poor academic performance in children. Self-report or parent-proxy report of children's screen time has been the most common method of measuring screen time, which may be imprecise or biased.

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of measuring the screen time of children on mobile devices using the Family Level Assessment of Screen Use (FLASH)-mobile approach, an innovative method that leverages the existing features of the Android platform.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the feasibility, reliability, and correlation of skin carotenoid score (SCS) measurements in 4-month-old infants as a means of assessing carotenoid intake and plasma concentrations.
  • Using a portable reflection spectroscopy device, researchers measured SCS in 21 infants, analyzing relationships between SCS, dietary intake, and plasma carotenoid levels, while also exploring measurements in older infants.
  • Results showed strong reliability in SCS measurements and notable correlations between SCS and carotenoid intake and plasma levels, particularly in infants at 4 and 8 months old, but not in those transitioning to complementary feeding at 6 months.
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Objective: Maternal control and directiveness in Latina/o families often do not show the negative associations with child adjustment seen in European American samples. This study tested the self-determination hypotheses that Latina maternal involvement and structure would be positively associated with preschool children's later self-regulation, whereas directiveness and control would show negative relations.

Design: At Time 1, 130 low-income Latina mothers were observed helping their 4- to 5-year-old children complete a stressful task.

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Feeding styles of parents have been associated with dietary quality/intake and weight outcomes; however, much of the research to date has been cross sectional and the direction of influence unclear. This prospective longitudinal study evaluated the direction of effects between feeding styles and child appetitive traits over time in a sample of 129 Hispanic parent/child dyads that participated in a larger study. Data analyzed for the current study were collected when the children were 4-5 years old and again at ages 7-9 years.

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Background: Preschool-aged children's physical activity (PA) and screen time (ST) are important health-related behaviours likely influenced by PA opportunities, parental perceptions of neighbourhood safety and parenting practices pertaining to PA and ST. How these factors interact to impact on young children's PA and ST, and whether their effects are generalisable across cultures and geographical location is not known. This study addressed these knowledge gaps by conducting pooled analyses of comparable data from two culturally and geographically diverse samples - Chinese parent-child dyads from an ultra-dense city (Hong Kong, China) and Latino parent-child dyads from a low-density city (Houston, USA).

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Sustainability of intervention programming is challenging to achieve under real world conditions, since few models exist and many studies do not plan far beyond the funding period. Programming content in early care and education centers (ECECs) is often driven by guidelines. However, implementation is very sensitive to contextual factors, such as the setting and implementer (teacher) characteristics.

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Background: Television viewing among children is associated with developmental and health outcomes, yet measurement techniques for television viewing are prone to errors, biases, or both.

Objective: This study aims to develop a system to objectively and passively measure children's television viewing time.

Methods: The Family Level Assessment of Screen Use in the Home-Television (FLASH-TV) system includes three sequential algorithms applied to video data collected in front of a television screen: face detection, face verification, and gaze estimation.

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Environmental characteristics of early care and education centers (ECECs) are an important context for preschool-aged children's development, but few studies have examined their relationship with children's locomotor skills. We examined the association between characteristics of the ECEC environment with quantitatively (i.e.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected both home and work routines and may have exacerbated existing inequities. The objectives of this study were to describe pediatric faculty work productivity and caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic, identify groups at risk, and better understand mitigation strategy preferences. We conducted a cross-sectional electronic survey of Department of Pediatric faculty.

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