Rethinking youth health and education through research

Rethinking youth health and education through research

How would you describe the state of young people’s health in New Zealand, particularly those from poorer or disadvantaged communities? Phrases like “the obesity epidemic”, “binge drinking culture”, “sexual promiscuity”, and “TV or computer fixated” might be at the top of the list.

But Dr Katie Fitzpatrick of the University of Auckland is using her Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ) Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to prove that’s not the case.

The $800,000 RSNZ five-year research grant, titled Rethinking Health Education and Promotion: Health Capital and Diverse Youth, will expand knowledge about youth health by focusing on how young people are developing and applying their own health knowledge, particularly in New Zealand schools.

In her study Dr Fitzpatrick, a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education’s School of Curriculum and Pedagogy, will analyse how and why students from low decile schools are choosing to take health education as a formal senior school subject for NCEA. New Zealand has a world-leading health education curriculum but little is known about the impact of this on the lives of young people. The research will chart how young people learn health and the impact of this on their lives and the lives of their families and wider communities.

Current media coverage on the ‘healthiness’ of young people and their communities tends to focus on a combination of moral panic, disease prevention and short-term health interventions, particularly if you are Maori or Pasifika. The reporting also tends to assume that these young people are ill-informed about health and are thus constantly ‘at risk’ of making bad decisions.

“It’s about challenging these stereotypes of young people’s health, along with a negative view of them and their communities,” Dr Fitzpatrick says.

“They’re always getting cast in a negative light about their health choices when there are actually a wide range of positive options that these young people and their communities take.

“There are lots of young people who are really pro-active and well-informed about their health and the choices they make.”

Dr Fitzpatrick will conduct her research over a range of separate studies, including an analysis of achievement trends in health education at NCEA level by ethnicity, school decile, gender and location; and an exploration of youth perspectives on health, including how they transfer the health knowledge they learn at school to their wider community, via family and friends. Other studies involve international collaborations around digital technologies in school health programmes;mapping of the history of health education, and how teachers develop health knowledge and act as health agents in schools.

The prestigious fellowships are administered by the RSNZ on behalf of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. The fellowships were first established in 2011 and their aim is to foster the development of future New Zealand research leaders who are currently early and mid-career academics.

This year 140 New Zealand academics, working both in New Zealand and overseas, applied. Only 10 fellowships were awarded and this is the first time that someone from the field of Education has received the award. Typically, this fellowship has been awarded to science-based academics.

Dr Fitzpatrick says the Rutherford is like “the jackpot of research grants in that sense, it’s an incredible privilege.”

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