Rethinking School Lunch
Moira O'Neill, Professor
Institute for Urban and Regional Development
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
School meal programs play a critical role in addressing childhood hunger, and initiatives to improve healthy eating often target school meal programs for improvement. This research explores how school districts address food access, health, educational, environmental, and social issues simultaneously through comprehensive school meal program reform. This approach to school meal program reform typically aims to improve the quality of the school meal program (in terms of nutritional content) while also reducing the environmental footprint of their school meal programs by focusing on shifting operations towards a localized food system.
Covid-19 put a spotlight on the critical need for school meal program systems change. Pandemic-related supply chain shortages that impacted student access to school meals revealed the fragility of traditional school food systems. But it also highlighted an opportunity for change: the factors essential to robust Farm to School programming—community engagement, scratch cooking, and building local farm relationships—can foster resilient and flexible school meal programs.
This research supports a public-sector led initiative to change school food in Oakland. Undergraduate Researchers will be offered opportunities to support work explores sustainable meal program changes at a local scale and help support policy implementation in an urban setting.
Role: Specific role for the undergraduate (tasks and learning outcomes)
Tasks and outcomes include, but are not limited to:
(1) Students will support transcription of key informant interviews, which will help situate them in the context of the project, the different perspectives on the research topics, and familiarize them with key terms and concepts around school nutrition programs.
(2) Students will support literature review of popular press articles and relevant academic research. They will help with identifying and reviewing relevant sources, particularly those that reflect the changing context of the pandemic and its impact on school meal programs.
(3) Students will assist with coding qualitative data, such as key informant interviews and other key documents in MAXQDA, which will help them build an understanding of how researchers design a coding structure and use it to analyze qualitative data. This will also provide students an opportunity to learn how to use qualitative data analysis software.
(4) Students will assist with mapping/GIS and data visualization as needed, which will provide an opportunity for those who are interested in learning or practicing software and design skills.
(5) Students will participate in at least some meetings with participant school district and department of education personnel. This will allow students to observe and understand how researchers may gather input on study aims and methods, while also sharing preliminary findings and analysis, with professionals in the field of study.
(6) Students will help administer questionnaires or conduct structured observations at several local schools, enter data into computers or survey platforms, and conduct descriptive statistical analyses for cleaning and sample description purposes. This will allow students to learn about survey methods and data collection protocols.
(7) Students will participate in weekly lab meetings, allowing students to learn from each other and faculty leads.
Qualifications: Required qualifications include:
(1) Experience or interest in transcribing interviews
(2) Experience or interest in researching popular press/journal articles
(3) Experience or interest in social sciences, education, or public health research
(4) Experience or interest in working with datasets and/or Microsoft Excel
(5) Able to commit at least approximately 6-8 hours a week to research activities
(6) Upper division standing
(7) Motivated to learn, very organized and detailed oriented
(8) Coursework in nutrition, public health, psychology, education or social welfare
(9) Willing to travel to local schools for data collection.
Desirable but not required qualifications include:
(1) Experience with coding in MAXQDA
(2) Experience working with data visualization/mapping software including ArcMap or QGIS
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Susana Matias, Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension in Nutrition
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: There will be some off-campus field work.
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology