Actitudes parentales y sobrepeso infantil. El papel de la comunicación

Zusammenfassung

The overweight adults and children have become a pandemic in recent decades, particularly in Western countries. This dissertation has two main objectives: Firstly to confirm how parental attitudes influence their behaviors and how those behaviors have and influence on their children's behaviors which may lead to overweight. Secondly to find which messages are more efficient in persuading parents of the importance of promoting children's healthy habits. Specifically we want to find how to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables. We conducted two studies. In Study 1 we address the antecedents of childhood overweight and a model is proposed. We focus on all those behaviors that children perform at home and can have a parental influence: sleeping, hours of TV watching and dinner at home. We propose a model and some hypotheses. Parental attitudes influence their own behaviors and these behaviors moderate their children's behaviors witch build their weight. Methodology. A survey of parents was used. Respondents were parents of children attending primary school in the region of Murcia. They had to answer about their attitudes and behaviors toward healthy habits and their eldest child at school. Weight and height of parent and child is asked Study1 results. Positive parental attitudes toward sleep and family norms influence the child sleeping hours. Children who sleep more have less chances of being overweight. Positive parental attitudes toward TV mean homes with more TV sets. This factor increases the hours the child watches TV. Childhood overweight increases with child TV watching. Positive parental attitudes to feed their children influence if there is a healthy food environment at home, this fact influences what child healthy eating habits. These habits lower the chances of the child to be overweight. Study 2. The goal is to find a persuasive message that increases the parental intentions to provide healthier food to their children. We propose a model in which the characteristics of the ad endorser (expert / attractive) and tone of the message (positive / negative) and / or (emotional / rational) will have a significant influence on the parental intention to give more the fruits and vegetables to their children. Methodology. A between subjects experimental design is conducted. 2 (message: positive vs negative) x 2 (expert vs. appeal) x 2 (emotional vs. rational message). Each group of parents was exposed to a different ad combining the independent variables. In total we had 8 experimental conditions. A self-administered questionnaire was sent to 1463 email addresses collected from study of 1. A total 290 parents click through the link and completed the questionnaire. Results. In terms of increasing parental intentions to give more fruits and vegetables to their children we found that expert endorsers were more effective than attractive endorsers. Ads with positive framing were more effective than ads with negative tone. Finally the emotional framing was more persuasive than the rational one. In addition, a highly significant interaction effect between the type of endorser who supports the message (expert / attractive) and the (emotional / rational) framing was found. This means that when a rational message is backed by an attractive endorser parental intention to increase the fruits and vegetables given their children is significantly lower than in other situations.