Out of laundry?

Chris Richards Arizona Daily Wildcat John Holman, Spanish junior, spends a few minutes answering questions about health habits yesterday in the Memorial Student Union. The survey, sponsored by Arizona Prevention Center, is the first step of a long term project which tracks individuals and the results of their healthy - and unhealthy - behavior.

The promise of a T-shirt brightly blazoned with the message, "It Won't Kill You to Stay Healthy," is drawing students to help out with a UA study charting their health practices.

However, the price of the T-shirt may not just be 20 minutes of filling out a health survey.

If funding comes through for the study researchers dubbed "Stay Healthy," these students will be answering questions about their health behaviors and psychological states far beyond college and into old age, said Norma Gray, the study's principal investigator.

"Our dream is to follow these students for several decades with intermittent surveys," said Gray, also an assistant professor of clinical prevention.

"We are very interested in following these students longitudinally to see how their current behavior relates to their health status later in life," she said, adding surveys are available at tables inside the Memorial Student Union.

The questionnaires ask students to give their name, number, address and the number of a contact person, who can help researchers keep in touch with them.

They then move on to answer an array of questions.

"The issues we are looking at on the survey are nutrition, weight, exercise, body image, sleep, sun exposure, alcohol intake and tobacco use," Gray said.

"We want to see how those health behaviors relate to psychological issues like whether or not the person feels control in their life, what do in response to stress and how much difficulty they have dealing with their anger and depressive symptoms," she said.

The study is sponsored by the Arizona Prevention Center, a branch of University Medical Center that received a $10 million donation last month.

It was designed to reveal facts that can be used to serve student interests long before the study period is up however.

"It's really a two-part study - we're getting the information which can be used to develop and enhance health promotion programs," Gray said.

"Once we get an idea of what kind of health behaviors these students engage in, the health promotions office of the Campus Health Center will use some of the information to enhance their current programming" she added.

As it stands, the study can operate for a year, but whether the investigation will have funds to continue following the students remains to be seen.

Although the researchers are searching for future dollars, they are excited about the volume of student response - over 700 so far out of a 1,000-student goal, Gray estimated.

The target number is not set in stone, said Ori Parnaby, Gray's research assistant.

"Because the attrition rate is pretty high, the larger the sample size the more you'll have in the future," she said. "It's been so busy that we've run out of room at the table and had to give out surveys on clipboards."

And the lure for students?

Spanish junior John Holman said he filled out the survey to kill time.

"And of course for the T-shirt," he added.

This was also true for molecular and cellular biology senior Xenia Frisby.

"I need some T-shirts for running," she said.

Speech and Hearing Sciences senior Natalie Wright said she was a veteran survey respondent.

"I enjoy filling out surveys," she said. "I think it's helpful to others."

Holman said although he found the survey questions a little dull, they were nonetheless eye-opening.

"It was kind of a wake-up call, a conscience-pricking experience - after answering the questions on fitness and exercise I realized that I'm not exactly a walking billboard for GQ or Men's Health and Fitness," he said.