Author: Marisa Kuhn | Major: Exercise Science and Psychology | Semester: Spring 2024

During the spring of 2024, my second semester of senior year, I wrapped up working on

my exercise science research study alongside my mentor, Dr. Erin Howie Hickey. I joined Dr.

Howie Hickey’s RECESS lab in the spring of 2023 and have continued to work within this lab for

the past year and a half. My thesis is about the accessibility of local Northwest Arkansas

playgrounds for children with physical disabilities. My study specifically strives to observe and

assess how accessible the playgrounds are to populations of children with disabilities. In

addition, it aims to observe different intensity outputs of each activity and see what effect this

may have on this population of children. More research must be conducted on this topic

because there is little research currently observing the accessibility of public and school

playgrounds as well as what activity intensity levels these children are missing out on. I believe

that this topic is very important because physical activity is vital for the health and well-being of

all individuals, especially young children. According to the ACSM’s recommendations, children

should be attaining over 60 minutes of physical activity a day which is not being met. It is

suspected that even lower levels of activity are being met by children with disabilities.

 

My experiment utilized three local playgrounds and accelerometers to collect data from 9 total

playground activities as well as an accessibility checklist found through research to determine

each playground’s inclusivity. The purpose of this study was to determine the overall

accessibility of local playgrounds and to assess the intensity levels of different classic

playground activities to find out specific activity intensities children with disabilities were missing

out on. I hypothesized that the playgrounds would have limited accessibility according to the

Brown et al. 2021 recommendations and that many of both the high-intensity and low-intensity

playground activities would not be accessible to all children. Three axes and the vector

magnitude of each participant were collected on the accelerometer. The vector magnitude taken

at 60-second epochs average was solved for the 4-minute total of each activity. This value

represents the total intensity level of each activity.

 

Dr. Howie Hickey and I spent the fall semester creating a plan for this participant study

and aligning it to the already planned Playworks Intervention study. Over this past semester, the

IRB approved my study so I was ready to begin working on more tasks towards the end of the

semester. However in at the beginning of this semester, we still did not have a selected school

and time was running out. There were many changes made to the original plan and I ended up

still completing a research project over the same general idea but instead focused on

playground activities and accessibility. As soon as the change was made I created a list of

classic playground activities, recruited participants, and organized a time and procedure for

collecting data. After the data collection was complete I worked on analyzing the accelerometer

data and doing a few simple calculations to find the averages for each activity’s intensity output.

Then it was time to work on a presentation and a final paper. This past spring I wrote my thesis

and defended my research in April at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.

I chose to research this topic because I have always had a passion for working with

children with disabilities. In January 2025 I will be attending the University of Arkansas/UAMS

Occupational Therapy program where I aspire to work with individuals with physical and mental

disabilities. I knew that choosing a research topic that both focused on a population I have a

passion for and utilizing what I have learned from my exercise science degree would be both

rewarding and enlightening. I also was lucky to be taught by a professor who had a similar

passion for children like me and inspired me to follow through with my research goals, Dr. Howie

Hickey.

 

This Honors College Research Grant has enabled me to study and research a topic that

I have an overflowing passion for. I have learned how to interact with patients and research

subjects especially individuals with developmental delays which will be essential for my future

career in Occupational therapy. I also have learned how to measure observational data in a

formal research setting which I will also utilize in further research such as my doctoral capstone,

and further research in my career to promote evidence-based medicine in the field of OT .