Grad Profile

Thompson makes impact in long-term health study

Kinesiology graduate student Angie Thompson. Photo by Joel Deshaye for the College of Graduate Studies & Research

By Joel Deshaye

There was a time not long ago when Angie Thompson didn’t know where university studies would take her.

Now Thompson has just defended her PhD in the College of Kinesiology at the U of S – and her research could soon help people appreciate the benefits of physical activity throughout their lives.

But she wasn’t always certain about her career choice. "I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I started my master’s degree," says Thompson.

Before enrolling as a graduate student, Thompson was already teaching as a sessional lecturer, a very unusual achievement for someone with one degree. "I really loved teaching and started to like research work and started my master’s degree," she says.

Thompson’s research project in the MA program, under the supervision of Dr. Karen Chad, was a study of how young girls develop attitudes about body image. She studied recreational dancers between the ages of six and 15, hoping to discover what factors play a role in the onset of eating disorders.

Remarkably, she found that "something like 30 per cent of the girls at that age [seven years] were already wanting to have a smaller body shape" and this percentage increased in older girls.

When Thompson shifted her focus for her PhD research, she wanted to study heart disease, but these plans changed.

"I was going to look at primary prevention of heart disease. In the interim I got a wonderful research position as the co-ordinator of a follow-up of the Saskatchewan Growth and Development Study," which followed boys and girls over a nine-year period between 1964 and 1973. The study is now in its second phase and Thompson expects that the College of Kinesiology will return to the study again, probably in 2007 and 2017. It will have studied the same people for more than 40 years.

By 2007, the men in the study will be around 50 years old and "will be exhibiting a lot more heart disease ... we’ll see a lot more ill effects of an inactive lifestyle."

"I think [this research] will have an impact," says Thompson. "There are things that we could do differently with our children today to make sure that they are active longer."

According to Thompson, "there are not many longitudinal studies in the world that follow a set of people for that long and that intensely and then come back and follow them again."

She attributes the continued success of this study to "a key group of researchers [at the College of Kinesiology] who really believe in what they are doing and pursue it."

She is particularly happy about the enthusiasm of her colleagues at the College, especially Dr. Robert Mirwald, her thesis supervisor.

But no matter how good the College environment is, the life of a teacher and researcher is often a balancing act.

"One of the biggest challenges is combining teaching, class work, research, and family," says Thompson. "The biggest skill I’ve learned is organization."

And it helps if you like the work. Thompson recently analysed the data from almost 1,000 pages of transcribed interviews between her and subjects in the study. "I love the contact with people," she says. "I don’t think I’d be a very good rat researcher."

Angie Thompson successfully defended her PhD dissertation in December.

Joel Deshaye writes profiles of U of S graduate students as part of a fellowship with the College of Graduate Studies and Research.