eHealth Researcher Spotlight: Temitope Erinosho

THRIVE for Health

Taking center stage this month is the wonderful Dr. Temitope Erinosho, Research Assistant Professor of Nutrition at UNC, and her innovative approach to obesity and cancer risk prevention in children from low-income families. Currently, she is developing a family-based life skills intervention (THRIVE for Health) to help low-income parents develop psychosocial skills to better navigate their daily challenges and promote healthy weight behaviors in their preschool aged children.

Dr. Erinosho has been working with CHAI Core to complete the formative phase of her study, Understanding concerns, needs, and challenges of low-income parents of preschool children aged 3-5 years old. CHAI Core conducted and analyzed the results of 10 in-depth interviews and 4 focus groups with low-income parents in rural and urban areas of North Carolina to assess their needs, concerns, and challenges as parents of young children, as well as ways to engage them in a life skills intervention. Five key stakeholders who are leaders of community organizations that serve low-income families were also interviewed to understand their perspective on how to engage families in a life skills intervention.

The second phase of the study will use these findings to develop and implement the intervention.

We asked Dr. Erinosho a few questions about herself and her work…

What attracted you to using qualitative research for your intervention?

To appropriately target the life skills intervention, we needed to first understand the daily concerns, needs, and challenges experienced by low-income families with preschool-aged children. We decided to use qualitative research methods because we believed it would allow us to narrow down on topics to focus on in the intervention, and also delve deeper into challenges, needs, and concerns that parents have around the topics. In addition, using qualitative methods allowed us to receive critical feedback from participants about their preferred mode (e.g., frequency, time allotted) and format (e.g., in-person, telephone or text messaging delivery) for the delivery of the intervention.

What impact do you hope your work will have?

That the THRIVE for Health intervention will help improve low-income parents’ psychosocial well-being (e.g., self-esteem, self-confidence, ability to problem-solve) and encourage them to institute changes that support healthy weight development in their children and families.

If you could have any other profession in the world, what would it be?

Hmm…..probably a medical doctor. I’d love to be able to save lives, though not sure what specialty I would have picked.

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The UNC CHAI (Communication for Health Applications and Interventions) Core provides a bi-monthly Researcher Spotlight and eHealth Digest that highlights UNC researchers and innovative studies that make interesting use of technology for behavior change. If you know someone who would want to be added to their mailing list, please let them know to subscribe here.