Child and Parent Food Choices and Purchases: Contributions to Obesity

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Obesity rates of adults and children are alarmingly high in the United States. Given the link to several chronic health conditions, obesity rates are a substantial public health concern. The etiology of obesity is multifactorial; however, excessive caloric intake is one of the major known contributors. Therefore, health promotion and obesity prevention efforts have increasingly emphasized improving dietary intake. Children's dietary intake is directly related to the home food environment, which is made up of the foods purchased by a family. However, there is a paucity of research investigating the influences on food purchases for parents and children. The proposed secondary analysis, Child and Parent Influences on Food Purchasing (CAPIP), will investigate multilevel influences on parent and child food purchases using a social ecological framework. Investigating purchasing influences of both parents and children is important, as research findings will have implications for family-based obesity prevention interventions, which in the past, have led to more positive results than interventions targeted to children or parents separately. The CAPIP study will utilize a cross-sectional design using data from 90 families in the second cohort of the Healthy Home Offerings via the Mealtime Environment (HOME) Plus trial. Family survey data include responses from 8-12 year-old children and their primary meal- preparing parent. There are two main objectives of the proposed CAPIP study. The first is to assess the psychometric properties of multilevel purchasing influence items like family time constraints and cooking skills (as measured by HOME Plus, which includes new HOME Plus purchasing items developed, in part, by the applicant) and explore the development of psychometrically-sound scales for future research. Given the novelty of these items, the study findings will contribute to the field regardless of whether the items form scales or are used as individual items. The second objective is to evaluate the food purchasing influences for families, including their differences by sociodemographic characteristics and their associations with health outcomes. Findings will detect how strongly children's and parents' influences on food purchases explain variability in children's food intake and weight outcomes when accounting for sociodemographic characteristics and home food availability. To meet these objectives, item and scale psychometric properties will be described, factor analysis will be conducted, and descriptive associations (e.g., correlations, chi-square) and hierarchical regression analyses will be tested. The long-range goal of this study is to expand quality measurement and inform tailored nursing interventions and services that will improve the healthfulness of food purchases, food environments, nutritional intake, and lifestyles of families to address the health crisis of the obesity epidemic.