Associate Professor of Psychology Buffie Longmire-Avital, Assistant Professor of Exercise Science Takudzwa "Titch" Madzima and Elyse Bierut '16 examined the rates of engagement in high-calorie burning activities of black and white American collegiate females.
Associate Professor of Psychology Buffie Longmire-Avital, Assistant Professor of Exercise Science Takudzwa “Titch” Madzima and Elyse Bierut ’16 co-authored an article in the latest issue of Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal examining the rates of engagement in high-calorie burning activities of black and white American collegiate females.
Race and Exercise Engagement: Investigating the High-Calorie-Burning Activities of White and Black Collegiate Women is one in a series of papers that explores how the experience of race, specifically race-related stress impacts health (e.g., obesity risk) and well-being.
The primary purpose of this descriptive study was to examine whether the rate of engagement in high-calorie-burning (HCB) activity, such as running or elliptical machine use, by collegiate females differed by race. A secondary purpose was to explore how the chronic stress of racism for Black women was related to their HCB activity. Three hundred and eighty-three collegiate females between the ages of 18 and 25 (M = 19.67, SD = 1.45) participated. Results from a chi-squared analysis (χ [1] = 8.40, p = .004) revealed that White collegiate women (70.3 percent) were more likely to report participation in weekly HCB activity than Black collegiate women (55.7 percent). Additional analyses also suggested that chronic experience with racism (F [1, 147] = 5.13, p = .03) was associated with more frequent HCB activity for the Black women sampled. The authors encouraged campus health promotion campaigns to not overlook how the experience of race may shape health behaviors for their racial minority students and incubate emerging health disparities.
Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal, a peer-reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship advancing our understanding of women in sport and physical activity.” Upon graduation, Bierut is currently working for University Hospitals as a government relations specialist in Cleveland/Akron, Ohio, while currently pursuing a master of public health degree.