Michele Polacsek awarded $190,000 grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Eating Research program
Michele Polacsek, Ph.D., M.H.S., associate professor in the 91直播视频鈥檚 , was awarded a $190,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation鈥檚 (RWJF) Healthy Eating Research program for a study which will begin on February 1, 2016 and run through July 31, 2017. Polacsek is the principal investigator for the study, which will assess the digital marketing of food and beverages in middle schools across the country to inform policy to restrict marketers' access to children in the school environment.
Digital marketing is a very important and often overlooked aspect of school-based marketing. Many students receive targeted junk food and beverage advertisements on their smart phones, school-issued laptops and tablets at school. To date, researchers have found neither tools nor data to help inform the debate and policy development on digital marketing in school settings. To address this gap, Polacsek and her colleagues developed a survey to assess digital marketing in schools as part of a previous project funded by RWJF. In this new study, they aim to assess school digital marketing environments in a national sample of middle schools to shed light on how they may be improved.
Liam O鈥橞rien, Ph.D., associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Colby College, is the co-investigator. Other project partners include Market Decisions Research, a Maine-based survey research firm; Laura Nixon, M.P.H., and Pamela Mejia, M.P.H., with Berkeley Media Studies Group; Faith Boninger, Ph.D., and Alex Molnar, Ph.D., with the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Sabrina Adler, J.D., with Changelab Solutions.