During the past 19 years, Dr. Dunnagan has been involved in a variety of health interventions within work sites and communities as a practitioner, director, educator, or evaluator.  The projects have addressed diverse topics such as welfare reform, family empowerment, work site health/health care costs containment, obesity, falls in the elderly, fetal alcohol syndrome, and substance abuse.  He has published over 25 manuscripts and has been involved with grants and contracts totaling over $750,000.  His graduate students been directly involved in many of these projects.

Programs

• Graduate coordinator for Health Promotion and Education and Exercise and Nutrition Sciences
  

Research

• Relationships between physical activity and dietary behaviors
• Determinants of obesity
• Programming designed to address obesity
• Senior fall prevention programming
• Theoretical consideration in promoting exercise in pre-diabetics
• Outcome evaluation techniques within work site and community settings
• Process evaluation techniques within work site and community settings
• Health status behaviors and indicators and their relationship to health costs within work site settings
• Application of theories and models to promote health and well-being including the transtheoretical model, organizational change models, decision balance, mental heuristics, health belief model, social norms, environmental/ecologic modules, and transformative learning
• The impact of culture on health and well-being
• Mental health issues in the workplace
• Work site health promotion
• Job satisfaction and health promotion in the workplace
• Alcohol programming to address alcohol moderation/abstention
• Determinants of alcohol consumption
• Use of social marketing in the promotion of health

Recent Projects

• The development of new theory to facilitate exercise in a pre-diabetic population
• Three state intervention programs to address the issue of fetal alcohol syndrome
• Community obesity intervention within three rural states
• Application of social norms with alcohol consumption in pregnant women

Funded Projects that have Supported Students

• Four-year welfare reform program designed to strengthen families and promote self-sufficiency
• Three-year, four-state fetal alcohol syndrome intervention program
• Two-year work site health status/costs intervention program
• Four-year, three-state community obesity intervention program
• One-year senior citizen fall prevention program
• One-year mammogram cancer screening intervention
  

• Health
• Wellness
• Prevention
• Well-being