Research in the Appal TREE (Training and Research on Early Experiences) Laboratory is a collaborative effort among undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. We are generally interested in healthy child development and are particularly curious about the development of eating behavior and food preferences in children and animals. Our lab group meets to plan and to organize our ongoing research and to discuss the latest and most exciting literature related to our work. Students in the lab gain experience recruiting participants, collecting data, analyzing data, and presenting findings at local and national conferences. We are currently working to publish findings from two projects we called the Sibling Study and the Retrospective Study. For the Sibling Study, we collected information from families who have two children in order to learn about parents’ and children’s perceptions about similarities and differences in siblings. In the Retrospective Study, we collected information from college students and their parents about the development of their eating and feeding behavior. We are excited about the preliminary findings from these studies and look forward to sharing them.
Recently, I spent one year in New Zealand at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology in the School of Nursing. My colleagues and I developed a community-based research project called the Canterbury Eating and Feeding Study. In this study we collaborated with child health care workers to examine child feeding practices and eating behaviors in the Canterbury region of the south island of New Zealand.