Abstract
Open campus policies that grant access to the off-campus food environment may influence U.S. high school students’ exposure to unhealthy foods, yet predictors of these policies are unknown. Policy holding and built (walkability), food (access to grocery stores), social (school-to-neighborhood demographic similarity), and organizational (policy holding of neighboring schools) environment data were collected for 200 Oregon public high schools. These existing data were derived from the Oregon School Board Association, WalkScore.com, the 2010 Decennial Census, the 2010–2014 American Community Survey, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, TDLinex, Nielson directories, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Common Core of Data. Most (67%) of Oregon public high schools have open campus policies. Logistic regression analyses modeled open campus policy holding as a function of built, food, social, and organizational environment influences. With health and policy implications, the results indicate that the schools’ walkability, food access, and extent of neighboring open campus policy-schools are significantly associated with open campus policy holding in Oregon.
Highlights
We explored different effects using those nearest neighbor thresholds and found that the 45 nearest neighbor threshold adequately characterized the spatial extent of the organizational environment of Oregon public high schools that influences whether a focal Oregon public high school held an open In Model 2, we see that a one-percentage point increase in the nearest 45 high schools that have an open campus policy is significantly associated with a 6.2% increase in the odds of the focal school within that organizational environment having an open campus policy
This study contributes to previous research by advancing a new empirical analysis of the prevalence of open campus policies among Oregon public high schools, and it is the first to identify multiple environmental predictors of open campus policy holding
The findings indicate that the majority of Oregon public high schools had open campus policies as of 2017
Summary
Among U.S youth, frequent consumption of fast food is positively associated with less healthy diets (e.g., higher total caloric intake, more servings of sugar-sweetened beverages, fewer servings of fruits and vegetables) [1]. An extensive body of research attributes youth dietary behavior to varied cognitive, affective, habitual, and environmental influences [2]. Systematic reviews [4,5] have indicated that future research should pay better attention to schools and their food policies that can affect youth dietary behaviors. The mere number of on- and off-school campus food options to which high school students have access is positively associated with the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, high-fat foods, and fast food meals [6]. Public Health 2020, 17, 469; doi:10.3390/ijerph17020469 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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