None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Globally children's intake of unhealthy foods and beverages is excessive, contributing to weight gain and risk of obesity. There is a lack of research focusing on unhealthy foods with majority of past research focused on increasing healthy foods in the hope that unhealthy foods will also decrease, which has not been the case (Johnson et al., accepted). Parents play a key role in what children eat (Yee et al. 2017). Understanding the physical and social opportunity influences on parents’ food provision will help to guide future intervention content to support parents to make healthy food choices for their children. This project aims to explore the influence of physical* and social^ opportunity on parents’ unhealthy food provision choices for their 3-7 year old children. The project is focused on understanding the influence of parents’ physical opportunity, in terms of cost and time, and social opportunity, in terms of support from their child, co-parent and friends. The project will also determine whether the influence of physical and social opportunity on parental food provision differs in social occasions. To achieve the project aim a discrete choice experiment will be administered via an online survey to investigate parents’ hypothetical food provision in social and everyday occasions, where the food options vary in terms of the cost, time to prepare, support from child, significant family members and friends, and type of food (nutritional value). The discrete choice experiment contains a number of choice tasks (a type of single-answer question) which involves parents choosing between two hypothetical snack options or the neither (opt-out) option. The two snack options will vary in their attributes (e.g. cost, time, support from child, co-parent and friends, and the type of food). * Physical opportunity = the physical resources a parent has available, such as money (cost) and time. ^ Social opportunity = what is afforded by the social environment, such as support (or resistance/opposition) from the child, co-parent, extended family and friends.
Interventions
This study is a discrete choice experiment which contains a number of choice tasks (a type of single-answer question) that requires parents to choose between two hypothetical snack options or the neither (opt-out) option. The two snack options will vary in their attributes (i.e. cost, time, support from child, co-parent and friends, and the type of food). The context for this snack provision includes social occasions where family friends are present (experimental condition) versus everyday occas
This study is a discrete choice experiment which contains a number of choice tasks (a type of single-answer question) that requires parents to choose between two hypothetical snack options or the neither (opt-out) option. The two snack options will vary in their attributes (i.e. cost, time, support from child, co-parent and friends, and the type of food). The context for this snack provision includes social occasions where family friends are present (experimental condition) versus everyday occasions without family friends present (control condition). The study aims to examine the attributes (cost, time, support from child, co-parent, friends and type of food) that are most important to parents’ when choosing snacks to give their 3 to 7 year old children, in social occasions (experimental condition) versus everyday occasions (control condition). Parents will take part in an online survey containing the discrete choice experiment and questions regarding the explanatory variables and parent and child characteristics. They will be randomised within the survey tool to the experimental condition or control condition, followed by a break activity (wash out period), before being presented with the alternative condition. The discrete choice experiment design generated using NGene software was total of 20 choice tasks per condition. Each participant will be randomly allocated to complete one of 4 experimental choice sets (containing 5 choice tasks) and one of 4 control choice sets (containing 5 choice tasks). After parents are randomised to the experimental or control condition in the online survey they are again randomised to see one of the 4 choice sets. Each parent will complete a total of 10 choice tasks (5 per condition). Each parent’s involvement will take approximately 30mins, once-off, and completely online. By observing parents snack choices in different conditions using the discrete choice experiment, researchers are able to construct utility weights. These utility weights represent the value individuals attach to each of the attributes (cost, time, support from child, co-parent and friends, and type of food). This allow for an estimation of the relative importance of each attribute, and comparisons of the ranking of attribute importance between the two conditions (social occasions vs everyday).
Sponsors
Flinders University
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Parents of 3 to 7 year olds, fluent in English, aged 18 years or over, residing in Australia, who are primarily responsible for preparing their child's food.
Exclusion criteria
Parents of children outside of the specified age range (less than 3.0 or greater or equal to 8.0 years) at the time of the study.
Outcome results
None listed