SIRC Health Disparities Colloquium

Elizabeth Reifsnider, PhD, writes about her research work below:

My research program focuses on infant and child growth, nutrition, and the development of community-based interventions that can be made available to low-income children, primarily through the WIC program. I have created and implemented successful breastfeeding promotion and obesity prevention interventions that can be delivered through WIC nutrition education classes or through home visit-based programs to postpartum WIC mothers. An additional focus of my research program has been failure to thrive (FTT) in low-income children, which led to the development of home-visit and clinic-delivered interventions for enhancing growth in children. I created the Ecological Model of Growth (EMG) for this program of research and have shown its utility through generating the framework for subsequent studies on growth (either FTT or obesity) of children. I have also conducted numerous studies on the explanatory models Hispanic mothers employ for the growth and health of their children; results from these studies have guided content for intervention studies on childhood growth. My colleagues and I have studied the variables that differentiate low-income Hispanic families with normal weight children from those that have obese children. My current R21 study with obese WIC children is based on my EMG and was created through community-based participatory research (CBPR) and is being delivered in WIC clinics.