Building family and community capacity for thoughtful food decisions through leadership development, research, and education.

Food, functioning as sustenance and as a social act, matters to families throughout the lifecourse. However, community health research and interventions often overlook the role of family as a decision-making unit as well as families as primary contexts for food decisions. Many studies choose to focus on either solely the children or the parents when examining the food choices of families. Our research addresses the family as a whole functioning entity and its interaction with external cultural and social forces. Besides providing nutrition, the processes of acquiring, transforming, and consuming food affect human health and well-being. Food and eating have long been recognized as embedded in social, psychological, and cultural contexts in which families make decisions about food and eating. However, attempts to apply this knowledge in health care and community-based intervention programs have produced disappointing results. There is a need for tools for educators to help families assess their own family food decision-making processes and practices as well as research instruments to study the differences among families in their food decision-making styles, priorities, and family and community barriers to change.

We have developed educational and research tools to improve scientific understanding about family food decision-making and to assist professional and para-professional educators who work directly with families in nutrition education. We have conducted interviews with low income famlies in rural and urban sites in the U.S. and the Philippines. A research survey questionnaire on Family Food Decision-making has been developed and is currently in the pretesting stage. We have engaged professionals, para-professionals, researchers, and students in developing these tools as an educational process for developing current and future nutrition educators. We have combined local and professional knowledge and experience in nutrition education and food decision-making with our research findings to develop these web-based discussion guides and research instrument. WE launched the toolkit throuh a workshop for nutrition educators to improve their understanding of the family food decision-making cycle and pre-test the tools.

We have completed the following tools in the toolkit: (1) two discussion guides for families for making decisions about food and eating and for addressing a family goal to reduce the risk of obesity; (2) an activity to encourage systems thinking and recognition on interdependency among food system stakeholders and professionals. Using these tools has changed the way educators think about family food decision-making and how to work with families to improve their decision-making through greater awareness of their food and eating goals. It has also helped them think about ways to improve their community food system through civic engagement. These guides are being used to develop program specific family interaction guides for the Cooking Together for Family Meals project.

Food Decision-making

Simth-Lever: Cooking Together for Family MeaLS