Children diagnosed with Language Impairment (LI) often have difficulty with aspects of social communication. This thesis evaluates the effects of a social communication intervention focused on facilitating the correct production of emotion words in four elementary school-aged children with LI. Researchers monitored changes from pretreatment baseline data, through the intervention, and ended with posttreatment follow-up data for the emotions happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Based on baseline measures, emotion categories in which the child showed limited proficiency were targeted for the 20 intervention sessions. The emotions targeted were different for each child. Each intervention session contained a combination of storybook therapeutic strategies such as story enactment, story sharing, and modeling by the clinician to help increase the child's emotion understanding. The child participated in emotion recognition and emotion inferencing tasks. The data for each participant was analyzed individually and formatted into figures. Data analyzation was performed using percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) which provided insight into how successful the intervention was for each of the targeted emotions. The results of each child's emotion based words were varied, some participants making good progress and others showing little or no gains. These results suggest that the intervention was effective for some of the children and should continued to be refined.

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The Health Promoting School (HPS) is s a model that advances both the health and learning needs of students. Yet there is a lack of consensus on student indicators that reflect a HPS or a coherent understanding of what a HPS represents amongst various stakeholders. The goal of this research was to establish indicators of student health and wellbeing associated with policies and practices in schools, and to further our understanding of health promoting schools. The research proceeded in three phases. The first phase established a relationship between student health and academic achievement. The second phase examined the associations amongst student health and wellbeing and student and school-level factors. The third phase involved case studies of two schools in Ontario to examine the organisational and structural elements associated with achieving a HPS, and the mechanisms by which these elements support student health and wellbeing. The association between students’ self-rated health and their academic achievement found in the first phase provides a platform for advancing the health promoting school agenda in Canada at the research and policy levels. Subsequent findings established an association between the environment and disciplinary climate in schools, and the school’s academic and socioeconomic standing to student health and wellbeing outcomes. These findings also suggest overlapping effects of schools and neighbourhoods on students’ health and wellbeing, implying that school health promoting efforts will be more successful when partnered with efforts within neighbourhoods and communities. Finally, the case studies suggest that embracing a HPS philosophy that addresses students’ emotional and physical wellbeing may help support students’ overall learning. Findings, presented in an implementation model of a HPS, emphasise key action areas that need to be addressed when implementing HPS initiatives and enhancing the capability of the education system to improve the health and learning of students. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2009-10-05 13:45:06.342

To explore how children use dialect, and whether the dialectal language develops during growth might be of interest from a speech language pathologist’s point of view as the dialect could influence the child’s speech. Previous research is often based on older material and/or examines the speech of adults.  In the present study, everyday language in groups of south- eastern Swedish speaking children was investigated. The aim of the present study was to examine to what extent typically developed children of the ages of  5, 8 and 11 years use dialectal language. A further purpose was to discover which dialectal characteristics that were present in the different age groups, and how they differed. The children were video- and audiorecorded during group sessions in everyday settings. The collected material was transcribed according to principles of conversation analysis, and key portions were chosen for deeper analysis. The identified dialectal characteristics were diphthongal, distinctly open or closed vowels and regarding consonants retroflex flap [ɭ] and posterior /r/ were encountered. In prosody a final tonal raise in phrases was observed. Dialectal words and phrases and discourse markers were also documented.   The results of the present study showed that the children use dialectal language as early as by the age of 5, but that older children had a more distinguishable dialect. Throughout all age groups, the vowels were dialectally influenced. Most distinctive was a much closed /i/ with a diphthong, and characteristically open <ä> and <ö>. The characteristic final tonal raise in phrases was encountered in all age groups. Furthermore, a variation regarding dialectal use has been observed between children but also within the same child. Discourse markers were found primarily in the school-aged children, assumingly due to the increased desire of belonging to a group. The results of the present study may contribute to the ability to determine whether phonology, lexicon and/or grammar in a child is deviant or in fact reflected by the south-eastern Swedish characteristics. Also from a diagnostic perspective it might be of value to know when to expect hearing dialectal characteristics in the child’s speech.

For children with hearing loss, spoken language development often requires the use of hearing aids. Young children often have to rely on their parents or other adults to confirm that their hearing aids are functioning correctly; however, less than 50% of parents check their child’s hearing aids every day. Because of the significant likelihood that a hearing aid malfunction could go unnoticed, it is recommended that children learn hearing aid self-management skills in elementary school and become independent with these skills by middle school. Using the ICF Model of disability, self-management skills should include more than just hearing aid skills, but also skills such as self-advocacy; these can be grouped under one umbrella as “hearing loss self-management skills”. Pediatric self-management skills are associated with improved outcomes for other complex health conditions and have been shown to be responsive to pediatric-focused interventions. While there have been studies to design engaging ways of increasing these hearing loss self-management skills in adults, few have involved children. This study seeks to answer the following two research questions: the first, “What are the baseline hearing loss self-management skills in middle school-aged children?”; the second, “Are educational videos an effective way to increase hearing loss self-management skills in middle school-aged children?”. To answer the first question, children between the ages of 11 and 14 who use at least one hearing aid were asked to answer questions based on the Audiology Self-Advocacy Checklist – Middle School (ASAC-MS) on a scale of “Never/Rarely/Sometimes/Almost all the Time”, to observe their baseline self-reported skills. To answer the second question, a playlist of seven narrated videos with subtitles and visible faces for lipreading was created to address the different topics of the ASAC-MS. The participants were asked to watch these videos and answer the ASAC-MS again. While data collection is not complete, the research team anticipates that most participants will rate their skills in the Rarely or Sometimes categories in the pre-intervention ASAC-MS, and anticipates that the post-intervention ASAC-MS scores will be higher than the pre-intervention ASAC-MS scores. Answering these two research questions is an important step in identifying the needs of current young hearing aid users and identifying ways to meet these needs. Improved hearing loss self-management skills may result in improved speech and language for children with hearing loss in the future.

Med en socialkonstruktivistisk och sociokulturell ansats, studeras skolkuratorers uppfattning om och erfarenhet av grundskoleelevers psykiska hälsostatus samt skolkuratorernas definieringar av psykisk hälsa/ohälsa. Studien problematiserar att det rapporteras från återkommande enkätstudier att mer än varannan grundskolelev uppger sig ha återkommande psykosomatiska symptom vid minst två tillfällen i veckan, samtidigt som knappt nio av tio grundskoleelever uppger sig ha gott eller mycket gott psykiskt välbefinnande. Mer än varannan grundskolelev lider av psykisk ohälsa är utgångspunkten i den offentliga debatten. Empirin består av intervjuer med skolkuratorer vilka inte delar den bild av grundskolelevers psykiska hälsostatus som utmålas i den offentliga debatten. Allmängiltiga definitioner av psykisk hälsa/ohälsa finns inte, vilket bidrar till delade meningar råder bland forskare, myndigheter, politiker, media, etcetera om vad begreppen innebär. Utifrån studien kan slutsatser dras att definitionsförvirring, otillräckliga mätinstrument och brist på hänsyn till samhällsutvecklingen bidrar till en missvisande bild av grundskolelevers psykiska hälsostatus.

Title: Discovery of the opinion of older school aged children on health, movements and sport in the cities with a different number of population. Objectives: The aim of this thesis is to find, the extent to which today's kids follow sport, if the parents support them in movements and also if are the differences between the development of children from smaller city in comparasion with the capital city, where are the possibilities of sport activities significantly different. This work will help us to determinate which effect has family, school, TV and other activities which kids prefer to do. This thesis works together with the bachelor thesis titled: Find of opinions of older school aged children on health, exercise and sport at the gymnasium in Susice. Methods: There are several methods used in this thesis. Content analysis is used for working with literature. Content synthesis is used for connecting and continuing of received knowledge. Also is used questionnaire research for collecting and gaining of datas which are supported of non - invasive method of measurement, which include anthropological measurement of body height and body weight. In the end of the work is used the method of comparison for evaluation of the results of the final datas. Results: Based on our questionnaire survey, we get the...

abstract: Background: Healthy eating plays critical roles in the prevention of many chronic diseases, but there are many barriers in life that prevent people from adopting and maintaining healthy diets. Thus, identifications of barriers that people perceive they have in trying to eat healthy can guide the strategies for dietary behavior change interventions by taking account of the barriers. Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify and quantify the perceived barriers to healthy eating (PBHE), to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic factors and PBHE, and to explore the associations between PBHE and dietary intake among parents of elementary-school aged children living in South Phoenix, AZ. Methods: Socioeconomic factors and PBHEs were obtained via survey and diet was assessed by two interviewer-assisted 24 h diet recalls. The associations between employment and PBHEs, education and PBHEs, and household monthly income and PBHEs were analyzed by Mann-Whitney Test, Kruskal Wallis Test, and Spearman’s correlation test, respectively. The relationship between PBHEs and dietary intake were analyzed by Spearman’s correlation test. Linear regression was used to assess the associations between total PBHE, and dietary intake (including added sugar, fruit and vegetable), adjusted by covariates (including socioeconomic status, birth country, age and gender). Results: Of 149 participants who completed the survey (mean age = 38.47±7.08 y), 136 completed the 24 h diet recalls. The mean reported total, social support, emotions and daily mechanics PBHE scores were 2.63±0.91, 2.52±1.16, 2.71±1.06, and 2.58±0.95, respectively, out of a 5-point scale. Daily fruit, vegetable, sugar-sweetened beverage, sweetened foods, and added sugar intake were reported as 1.66±1.56 servings, 2.45±1.43 servings, 1.19±1.30 servings, 2.02±2.12 servings and 49.93±31.17 g, respectively. Employment status was significantly associated with total PBHE (Z = -2.28, p=0.023), and support PBHE (Z = -2.623, p=0.009). Education was significantly related to total PBHE (χ2 = -7.987, p=0.046), and daily mechanics PBHE (χ2= 11.735, p=0.008). Household monthly income levels were significantly correlated to daily mechanics PBHE (r = -0.265, p=0.005). Added sugar was positively correlated with total PBHE (r=0.202, p=0.020), emotions PBHE (r=0.239, p=0.006), and daily mechanics PBHE (r=0.179, p=0.040). Sugar sweetened beverage intake was significantly related to emotions PBHE (r=0.183, p=0.035). When adjusting for socioeconomic factors in the regression analysis, there was no significant association between PBHE and diet intake. Conclusion: Overall, results suggest PBHEs listed in this study are mainly associated with socioeconomic factors, but they are not related to diet intake. Future studies will focus on the precise role of overcoming some identified barriers in improving healthy eating behaviors, and the causality between barriers and healthy eating. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Nutrition 2018

Forskning visar att Sveriges unga rapporterar lägst psykiskt välbefinnande av alla EU-länder. Trots att den psykiska ohälsan orsakar höga samhällskostnader och lidande både för de drabbade och dess anhöriga, finns det inget entydigt svar på varför unga svenskar och barn mår så dåligt. Denna studie genomfördes då det finns en brist på forskning gällande främst yngre barn om vilka faktorer som orsakar försämrad psykosocial hälsa. En kvalitativ metod valdes för att fånga skolkuratorers och skolsköterskors subjektiva upplevelser av vilka faktorer som orsakar psykosociala problem hos barn i grundskoleålder. Det insamlade materialet har bearbetats med hjälp av en tematisk analys. Resultaten visar att faktorer som sociala medier, föräldrars engagemang, föräldrars skilsmässa, neuropsykiatriska diagnoser, ångest, skav i kamratskap, ökade krav på prestation och den fysiska skolmiljön hade betydelse för barns psykosociala hälsa. / Research shows that Sweden's young people report the lowest psychological well-being of all EU countries. Despite the fact that mental illness causes high social costs and suffering both for the affected and their relatives, there is no clear answer to why young Swedes and children feel so badly. This study was carried out as there is a lack of research concerning mainly younger children about which factors cause deteriorating psychosocial health. A qualitative method was chosen to capture school counselors' and school nurses' subjective experiences of which factors cause psychosocial problems in children of primary school age. The collected material has been processed using a thematic analysis. The results show that factors such as social media, parental involvement, parental divorce, neuropsychiatric diagnoses, anxiety, friction in friendships, increased performance demands and the physical school environment were important for children's psychosocial health.

This study investigated narrative and literacy differences between monolingual and bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and examined caregivers' perspectives on their language and literacy development. This mixed methods project involved semi-structured ethnographic interviews and case histories for caregiver measures, and it included a narrative production task and a literacy skills assessment for child measures. There were two participant groups: monolingual children with a DLD in kindergarten to sixth grade (Group 1) and bilingual children (English + additional language) with a DLD (Group 2). Thematic analysis of caregiver interviews revealed that monolingual families engaged in storytelling and reading activities to enhance literacy skills, while bilingual caregivers highlighted challenges in language and literacy, with less emphasis on storytelling. On literacy assessments, both groups exhibited varied performance with no systematic differences between groups observed. This varied performance for the participants could indicate an influence on their skills from their existing diagnosis. Overall performance did not suggest that there was an observable difference between monolingual and bilingual children in this study. Future research is needed to investigate these dynamics across larger and more demographically and linguistically diverse populations.