Health

The Anchorage School District and Providence Alaska Medical Center have made wearable activity trackers available for Anchorage school students who choose to use them. Mouhcine Guettabi, an assistant professor of economics at ISER, is assessing how wearing these devices affects physical activity among school kids. In a recent experiment, he gave students in grades three through six different levels of access to feedback from the activity trackers. Some students could go online any time to get information, but others could get feedback only once every two weeks. Join us at ISER to hear Dr. Guettabi discuss whether having more access to feedback made kids more active.

Many communities are developing ways of evaluating local well-being. Research shows that when local governments ask residents to take part in determining measures of well-being, the public is more likely to get involved in decision-making, and communities have more influence over resource management.

Kent Spiers, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary and a former research associate at ISER, compared how communities in Alaska and Yukon evaluate local well-being.

Nearly 2,700 Alaska children were in foster care in any given month of 2015—20% more than in 2014. More children of all races, all ages, and all regions of the state were in foster care in 2015. But the fastest growth was among White and other non-Native children; among the youngest children; and among children in Anchorage. These are among the findings of a new paper by Diwakar Vadapalli and Jessica Passini that reports on trends among Alaska children in foster care from 2011 through 2015.

Download the paper, The Growing Number of Alaska Children in Foster Care, 2011-2015 (PDF, 2.0MB). If you have questions, get in touch with Diwakar Vadapalli, assistant professor of public policy, at dkvadapalli@alaska.edu or 907-891-6686.

Research Matters No. 95. Assessing Repeat Child Maltreatment in Alaska December 15, 2015 Statistics from the federal Children’s Bureau show that the rate of repeat child abuse and neglect in Alaska is among the highest in the country. But a new study by ISER researchers Diwakar Vadapalli and Jessica Passini finds that even those grim numbers may underestimate how many children in Alaska are repeatedly abused or neglected.

Hear Dr. James Cox talk about his work developing a decision-support software program to help doctors make patient-discharge decisions. The talk is non-technical and intended for a broad audience interested in health care and technological innovations to improve outcomes for patients. Dr. Cox is a professor of economics at Georgia State University and one of the leading experimental economists in the world. His research team includes the chief of surgery at Emory Healthcare, the chief of surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins, and top econometricians.

For 20 years, Kids Count Alaska has been an ongoing program at ISER. It's part of the nationwide KIDS COUNT program, sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to assess the welfare of children around the country and provide data to support policies for improving children's lives. ISER researchers have taken a preliminary look at trends in Alaska over the past two decades, and found that children here are doing better in several ways: babies are much more likely to survive, high-school droput rates are lower, and the rate of violent deaths (accident, suicides, and homicides) among teenagers has dropped by nearly half.

Researchers with Kids Count Alaska will be taking a more detailed look at 20-year trends in the well-being of Alaska's children and teenagers in the months to come. If there are specific measures of well-being you'd like us to look at, get in touch with Virgene Hanna, director of Kids Count Alaska, at 907-786-5431 or mhanna7@uaa.alaska.edu.

ISER publications are solely the work of individual authors and should be attributed to them, not to ISER, the University of Alaska Anchorage, or the research sponsors.

The 2013-2014 Kids Count Alaska data book reports that teenagers in the state commit crime at only about half the rate they did 20 years ago, and that Alaska is one of the safest places in the country to be born, with the share of babies born at low birthweight 25% below the national average.

The new data book includes much more information on the health, safety, education, and economic status of Alaska's children and teenagers. Virgene Hanna, a senior researcher at ISER, directs Kids Count Alaska, which is part of the nationwide KIDS COUNT program, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The foundation sponsors programs in all 50 states, presenting data from many sources on the well-being of American children.

Download the data book (PDF, 2.5MB), or request a printed copy from ISER at 907-786-7710. If you have questions, get in touch with Virgene Hanna at 907-786-5431 or mhanna7@uaa.alaska.edu.

ISER publications are solely the work of individual authors and should be attributed to them, not to ISER, the University of Alaska Anchorage, or the research sponsors.