1. Quantifying parental preferences for interventions designed to improve home food preparation and home food environments during early childhood
- Author
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Senbagam Virudachalam, Karen Thomas, Paul J. Chung, Jennifer Faerber, Timothy M. Pian, and Chris Feudtner
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Adult ,Male ,Persuasion ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Population ,Health Behavior ,Psychological intervention ,Health Promotion ,Overweight ,Choice Behavior ,Body Mass Index ,03 medical and health sciences ,Food Preferences ,Young Adult ,Environmental health ,Surveys and Questionnaires ,Medicine ,Humans ,Early childhood ,Cooking ,Obesity ,education ,General Psychology ,media_common ,education.field_of_study ,Family Characteristics ,030109 nutrition & dietetics ,Nutrition and Dietetics ,Parenting ,business.industry ,Body Weight ,Infant ,Feeding Behavior ,Middle Aged ,Latent class model ,Health promotion ,Socioeconomic Factors ,Child, Preschool ,Female ,medicine.symptom ,business ,Social psychology ,Adolescent health - Abstract
Though preparing healthy food at home is a critical health promotion habit, few interventions have aimed to improve parental cooking skills and behaviors. We sought to understand parents' preferences and priorities regarding interventions to improve home food preparation practices and home food environments during early childhood. We administered a discrete choice experiment using maximum difference scaling. Eighty English-speaking parents of healthy 1-4 year-old children rated the relative importance of potential attributes of interventions to improve home food preparation practices and home food environments. We performed latent class analysis to identify subgroups of parents with similar preferences and tested for differences between the subgroups. Participants were mostly white or black 21-45 year-old women whose prevalence of overweight/obesity mirrored the general population. Latent class analysis revealed three distinct groups of parental preferences for intervention content: a healthy cooking group, focused on nutrition and cooking healthier food; a child persuasion group, focused on convincing toddlers to eat home-cooked food; and a creative cooking group, focused on cooking without recipes, meal planning, and time-saving strategies. Younger, lower income, 1-parent households comprised the healthy cooking group, while older, higher income, 2-parent households comprised the creative cooking group (p
- Published
- 2015