Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
In an effort to address persistently low dietary quality in children and adolescents, youth food education programs have begun to broaden out from the traditional focus on nutrition knowledge and skills toward helping youth cultivate a positive, holistic relationship with food through enjoyable hands-on experiences with gardening and cooking. Measuring the impact of these programs, however, is challenging, due to complex relationships among factors involved in food choices. Food literacy is a concept that seeks to capture an individual's understanding of and ability to navigate the interrelationships between food, health, and the environment, and measuring food literacy offers a metric for evaluating impact of food education programs. Conceptual development of food literacy, however, has primarily come from an adult-centered perspective, and an opportunity exists to better understand food literacy and its most salient domains at different stages of child development. While children have limited agency over their food decisions, they are nevertheless developing dietary patterns that will continue into their adult years--and into a future with even greater food production challenges. Age-appropriate food literacy measurement tools are needed to inform the planning and evaluation of food education programs and identification of policy strategies to support children in developing healthy and sustainable dietary patterns. This project will address the gap in understanding children's food literacy by developing and testing a novel questionnaire to measure food literacy in upper elementary schoolchildren that is based on a child and adolescent-centered definition of the concept. The questionnaire will be tested with 4th and 5th grade students at urban and suburban elementary schools in diverse communities to ensure it is valid and reliable in this age group. We will also collect data on children's experience with food education and fruit and vegetable intake and conduct analyses to understand relationships between food literacy, food education and fruit and vegetable intake. The findings from this research will be shared through a wide network of food education and policy stakeholders to inform coordinated program and policy approaches to improve children's dietary intake.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
Approaches to child and adolescent food education have broadened out from the traditional focus on nutrition knowledge to helping children cultivate a positive relationship with food through enjoyable hands-on experiences with gardening and cooking. Evaluating the impact of these programs is challenging, however, due to the complex interrelated factors that contribute to food choices. The emerging and evolving construct of food literacy offers an opportunity to better understand the scope of program impact, as itencompasses the dynamic relationships between food, health, and socio-environmental contexts. To date, defining and measuring food literacy has focused primarily on adults, and toadequately measure this construct in children, tools are needed that are based on developmentally-appropriate dimensions and competencies.The overarching goal of this project is to develop a food literacy assessment instrument that captures how upper elementary school children engage with and navigate their food context and understand broader food and agricultural systems to inform the planning, implementation, and evaluation of food education programs. The specific research objectives for the project are to: 1)Develop and test a questionnaire to measure food literacy in upper elementary school children based on a child and adolescent-focused conceptual definition and measurement framework,and 2)Conduct exploratory analyses to investigate the relationships betweenfood literacy, food education, and children's fruit and vegetable intake.
Project Methods
Objective 1 We will generate an initial item pool for the questionnaire to measure the 4 dimensions applicable to upper elementary school children identified through our scoping review that provides a child and adolescent-focused definition and measurement framework for food literacy: extent of ability to enjoy healthy food, extent of sharing food practices with others, extent of food knowledge, and extent of understanding and abilities in the practices of everyday eating. Items will be informed by the competencies identified for each dimension in the scoping review as well as applicable times from existing tools.To evaluate the content validity of our item pool, we will recruit a panel of 10 experts and practitioners in children's food education, nutrition, and food behaviors to assess the dimensions and questionnaire items in two rounds. We will recruit an equal balance of academic experts and food education practitioners via email, and those agreeing to participate will be asked to provide structured feedback anonymously via an online survey administered through REDCap. Experts will rate the relevance of questionnaire items to the food literacy dimension of interest, adequacy of items in sampling each dimension, and clarity of item wording and have the opportunity to provide open-ended feedback on the items. We will summarize the quantitative and qualitative feedback and adjust items accordingly following each round of feedback.We will conduct cognitive interviewing and test the questionnaire with a developmental sample of 4th and 5th grade students at n = 8 elementary schools in the Washington, DC metro region. We will work with each school to recruit a representative sample of 4th and 5th grade students to participate in the cognitive interviews and identify classrooms to participate in the developmental sample testing. We will obtain signed parent consent and verbal child assent for participation in the cognitive interviews and passive parent consent for children in the classrooms participating in the developmental sample. During cognitive interviews, students will respond to questionnaire items and explain their responses, and the researchers will ask follow-up questions to prompt students to "think aloud" about their interpretation of the questions and arrival at their answer choice. Student feedback from these group interviews will inform clarification of and refinement of questionnaire items. The facilitators will create a welcoming environment that gives all participants opportunities to share, helping to mitigate the potential for biased responses in a group setting.To test the reliability and validity of our questionnaire, we will administer the items to a developmental sample of 4th and 5th grade classrooms in each of the participating schools. We will administer the items using audience response system (ARS) technology, which has previously been used for questionnaire administration in diverse urban school settings. Projection of questions with ARS allows for larger font and pictures to aid young readers. Students use individual clickers to record their responses, which are then automatically saved into a computer database, maintaining confidentiality and reducing data entry burden for researchers. We will examine questionnaire item performance using confirmatory factor analysis for the 4 dimensions identified through our scoping review. We will compute Cronbach's alphas for each of the item groupings identified through factor analysis to evaluate internal consistency. To optimize scale length, and obtain our final questionnaire, we will drop items with the lowest item-subscale correlations in sequence until a dropped item lowers alpha below our acceptable threshold.Objective 2. We will maximize our school visits for developmental sample testing by collecting additional data that allows us to begin to examine relationships between food literacy, food education and fruit and vegetable (FV) intake. Individual students from the classrooms participating in the developmental sample testing will be notified prior to the study team's visit of the opportunity to contribute further to the research by completing additional surveys following the food literacy questionnaire. Parents will receive letters about the research opportunity and forms to provide informed consent, translated into the appropriate language. We will collect demographic information, previous exposure to food education and information about quantity and variety of fruit and vegetable (FV) intake from consenting students. We will first conduct multivariable linear regression analyses to investigate the independent associations between 1) food education exposure and FV intake, 2) food education exposure and food literacy level, and 3) food literacy level and FV intake, each controlling for salient demographic characteristics (age, race/ethnicity, biological sex). We will then conduct a mediation analysis to investigate whether food literacy level mediates the effect of food education on FV intake.Efforts: Dissemination of project findings will occur through paper publications, conference presentations, and through partner stakeholders in children's food education. Findings from the research will also be incorporated into food literacy modules developed for an undergraduate food systems class taught in each year of the project.Evaluation: Indications of project success include timely completion of milestones in each project year. Year 1 milestones: 1) submission of scoping review manuscript, 2) presentation of scoping review findings at a regional or national conference, 3) establish research team and schedule for regular team meetings, 4) completion of item pool generation, expert review, cognitive interviewing, developmental sample testing and data collection for exploratory analyses, 5) co-teach food systems course. Year 2 milestones: 1) completion of food literacy tool psychometric analysis and exploratory analyses with research team, 2) submission of 2 manuscripts--tool development and testing and exploratory analysis findings--to peer-reviewed journals, 3) presentation of food literacy tool and preliminary data findings at a regional or national conference, 4) meetings with six partner stakeholders for tool dissemination 5) serve as lead instructor for food systems course.