What’s in your dabba? children’s evaluations of ethnic lunchbox foods
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Shruthi M. Venkatesh (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Jasmine DeJesus
Abstract: Previous research has indicated that school lunchboxes play an integral role in children’s food socialization, and children negatively judge those who bring nonnormative food to school. To our knowledge, no study has experimentally examined children’s evaluations of different ethnic lunchbox foods. Using a virtual video-chat method, this study examined n = 81 children between 5-12 years of age and a comparison adult dataset of n=151 participants who completed our survey. We assessed 1) participants’ understanding that people from different cultures stereotypically eat different foods, indexed through a face-to-food matching task, 2) examined their evaluations of foods from different cultures in terms of their messiness, taste, smell, and appropriateness to bring to school and 3) explored how neighborhood diversity would influence their performance on the tasks. Older children and adults were more likely to make stereotype-matches on the face-to-food matching task. For adults, having a higher proportion of racial outgroup members in their neighborhoods made these matches more likely. Within-subjects ordinal regressions revealed that participants rated all lunchboxes positively, though children rated Mexican, Chinese, and Indian lunchboxes less positively than the American lunchbox while adults rated the Chinese and Mexican lunchboxes as more positive. There were interactions between food and evaluation type, and neighborhood diversity did not predict participants’ food ratings. The implications of our findings as they relate to food choices and social judgments are discussed.
What’s in your dabba? children’s evaluations of ethnic lunchbox foods
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Created on 5/1/2021
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2021
- Keywords
- Children, Ethnic foods, School lunchboxes
- Subjects
- Ethnic food $x Psychological aspects
- School children $x Food