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Posts Tagged ‘research’

Telling the story of child inequalities in health and care using big data

Posted in Academic, Children and young people, Health Inequalities, research, tagged on April 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »

By Melisa Campbell MFPH, Research Fellow in Public Health, (Out of Programme: SpR Public Health [St4]), Department of Public Health and Policy, University of Liverpool

Melisa Campbell

Telling the story of child inequalities in health and care using big data research has been my passion for the last six months of my Health Education England Academic Fellowship, a focus fuelled by my personal working experiences within public health departments and healthcare systems.

As many of us will be welcoming spring and making plans for the summer, I am at the ‘show how’ phase and planning for my pending PhD application, which builds firmly upon my out of programme academic experience at the Farr Institute and the Department of Public Health and Policy at the University of Liverpool.

During my fellowship so far, I have been fortunate enough to share my work at the recent Lancet Public Health Conference (2016) Swansea and the Society for Social Medicine (SSM) Conference 2016.  I am also currently drafting further papers with colleagues from University of Liverpool, University of Nottingham and University College London.

The first months of the fellowship were quickly consumed by intense technical training, making connections within and outside the university and refining my understanding of theories and methodologies necessary to deliver my proposal, particularly with relation to health inequalities and statistical methods.

On-going learning has appropriately defined my fellowship and considerably expanded my skills, knowledge and practice of research methods including statistical methods for regression analysis, dealing with missing data and longitudinal data. I’ve been learning to undertake these analyses in STATA, and also in R, which is an open source statistical platform that anyone can use for free, and so gaining transferable skills for public health service practice.

Much of my work has been exploring childhood social inequalities using the Millennium Cohort Study data – a nationally representative birth cohort of 19,000 children born at the turn of this century. Within this, I have maintained a special interest in childhood unintentional injuries, but my professional growth from this experience has facilitated a greater breadth of topics relating to child inequalities pertaining to paediatric hospital admissions, smoking initiation and school bullying, drawing on the expertise in the Farr Institute.

This has already been a rewarding experience and I look forward to making the most of my remaining time. My contact details, previous and when ready information on my current and future work can be found at: University of Liverpool: Melisa Campbell

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Have we taken our eye off the ball?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 9, 2014| 1 Comment »

  • Andy Graham – specialty registrar in Public Health, County Durham

A couple of years ago I found myself in need of a dissertation topic for an MSc in Public Health – ‘make sure it’s something you are interested in’ was the advice. Simple I thought, I just need to weave football and beer into a research project! All joking aside though, I have become interested in the relationship between the two over the years.

As a public health professional and former A&E nurse, I am well aware of the potential harms of excessive alcohol consumption. Also, as a fan who both attends matches and watches on TV, I have become increasingly aware at how visible this relationship has become. Of course, football and beer have long been associated, ever since Victorian landlords would set up teams, use the land out back for a pitch and, in the amateur days, employ the team as barmen in lieu of pay.

But at the risk of sounding like my dad, when I ‘was a lad’, you either went to the match, where as a young working class man it was normal to have a pint with the lads, or you waited for Saturday night’s Match of the Day for your football fix. The pubs were open sporadically, had no TVs, and the football was rarely broadcast anyway.

Fast forward a few years and we have football on satellite TV almost every night of the week and all day at weekends, most top flight football clubs sponsored at some level by an alcohol brand, marketing of alcohol, beer in particular, is rife and the norm appears to be drink beer and watch football with the lads in the pub. Opportunities to do both are far more common than when ‘I was a lad’, and not just within pubs, but within living rooms, where the cheaper alcohol deals of the supermarkets are very popular. As a dad myself I was disturbed by these developments, but hadn’t been able to quantify them.

I decided my dissertation would try to measure the amount of alcohol marketing that football TV viewers were exposed to. With the help of Jean Adams at Newcastle University, I planned the research. I chose six live broadcasts representing over 18 hours of footage, developed coding frameworks and watched 40 hours plus of coding footage to consider all the verbal and visual references.

The results shocked me:

• Over 2,000 visual images, 111 per hour on average, or around 2 per minute.

• 32 verbal references.

• 17 traditional advertisements, accounting for 1% broadcast time.

• Over 1,100 visual images in one alcohol sponsored Cup competition alone

The issue of traditional advertising commercials is interesting because the ‘voluntary’ codes of practice in place to regulate how alcohol is portrayed (should not appeal to youth, should not suggest social success, etc.) are most relevant to this type of advertising. Given that we know that quantity of alcohol marketing is more important than content, then the apparently unchecked stream of visual references in this research may be even more important, and we could argue that the current controls are completely inadequate because they are focused on content, rather than quantity.

I can’t help but feel that we have taken our eye off the ball – the globalisation of sports such as premier league football as a product, the satellite age, the endless thirst for profit and market share within corporations, the ‘self’ regulation that fails to control the exposure reported above, the relaxed licensing laws in this country, and the increase in type, availability, and affordability of alcohol. All of these things create a perfect storm in which alcohol and sporting idols become normalised as one and the same, and the brand becomes a member of the team. It feels as though the relationship between sport and alcohol has evolved towards its perfect and logical form.

I am disturbed to be one of a generation of football fans that has been manipulated in this way and that my children are also targets. And meanwhile, the alcohol industry has a seat at the policy making table through the Public Health Responsibility Deal. So we must ask the question: are we sleepwalking into a situation where drinking alcohol is so closely associated with the sporting heroes that children see on TV, that they are being actively normalised to become drinkers? No one seems to question this, but it is time someone did, and through public health advocacy it may just be up to us.

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