A conceptual classification of parents’ attributions of the role of food advertising in children’s diets

Abstract

Background: High levels of child obesity are triggering growing concerns about the prevalence and effects of food advertising targeted at children. Efforts to address this advertising are confounded by the expanding repertoire of media and promotional techniques used to reach and attract children. The present study explored parents' views on food marketing and the strategies parents employ when attempting to ameliorate its effects. As part of an online survey of Australian parents' attitudes towards a range of food advertisements, respondents were invited to provide additional comment in an open-ended question. The question was optional and asked "Are there any other comments you would like to make?". One in five of the survey respondents (18%; n = 235) elected to answer this question by discussing their views on food advertising and children's diets. The responses were imported into NVivo10 for coding and analysis. A grounded approach was used to draw meaning from the data and develop a proposed conceptual classification of parents' attributions relating to food advertising and its consequences.Results: The majority of responses related to the negative perceived effects of unhealthy food advertising on children's diets, with few respondents considering such advertisements to be innocuous. The responses were classified into four conceptual categories reflecting differing attitudes to advertising (negative to neutral) and varying levels of locus of control (low to high). The typical characteristics of parents allocated to the four categories exhibited variation according to weight status, television viewing habits, education level, and family size. The largest number of responses was coded to the category characterized by a negative attitude toward food advertising and a low locus of control. Parents in this category were more likely than others to be overweight/obese and heavy television viewers. Parents in the negative attitude to advertising and high locus of control category nominated a variety of parenting practices that could form the basis of parent education interventions. Conclusions: The results suggest that many Australian parents may feel disempowered in the face of high levels of advertising for unhealthy foods. The current voluntary regulatory code appears to be inadequate in scope and coverage to address this situation.

Factors influencing the frequency of children's consumption of soft drinks

“…Food marketing is known to stimulate children's purchase requests (Story & French, 2004), and previous studies have found that parents readily attribute at least some of their children's pestering behaviours to the very high prevalence of advertising for unhealthy products (Harris, Fleming Milici, Sarda, & Schwartz, 2012;Kelly, Chapman, Hardy, King, & Farrell, 2009;Mehta, Coveney, Ward, & Handsley, 2014;Pettigrew, Chapman, Miller, & Thomas, 2014). As such, efforts to reduce child pestering for soft drinks are needed to address the pervasive marketing of soft drinks in Australia .…”

“…Research suggests that exposure to food marketing makes parents' attitudes more positive and increases the likelihood that the products will be purchased for children (Dixon et al, 2011;Grier, Mensinger, Huang, Kumanyika, & Stettler, 2007). Along with more effective advertising regulation, another, albeit more costly, strategy is to invest in counter messages that promote healthy diets and inform both parents and children of the tactics employed by those seeking to increase sales of unhealthy foods and beverages (Dixon et al, 2014;Pettigrew et al, 2014). The results of the present study relating to the effect of weekend television viewing on attitudes to soft drinks suggest that counter messages are likely to have the most positive impact if disseminated primarily at weekends.…”

Parents’ Perceptions of Children’s Exposure to Unhealthy Food Marketing: a Narrative Review of the Literature

“…Research has indicated that although parents accept their responsibility to guide their children's food choices [35][36][37][38][39], they may feel undermined or disempowered by unhealthy food marketing [36,[40][41][42][43][44] and support stricter regulatory policies to support them [35,39,40,43,[45][46][47][48][49][50]. In studies spanning Australia, US, Pakistan, India, UK, Ireland and Indonesia, parents consistently reported feeling concerned about children's exposure to unhealthy food marketing [36,[39][40][41][42][43][50][51][52].…”

“…In an Australian study in 2014 [49], 235 Australian parents responded to an open-ended online survey question about their attitudes towards food advertising and children's diets. Overall, 78% of respondents perceived unhealthy food advertising to have a negative impact on children's diets.…”

“…Whilst the evidence is clear that parents are concerned with the unhealthy food advertising that they can see their child viewing (for example, in supermarkets, sporting events and on television), concern or awareness for food advertising on digital devices, which is less visible to parents, appears to be lower than for food marketing through other media and/ or settings [36,40,43,49,50]. Data from the 2015 US study from Harris et al [40] revealed parents were more concerned about the impact of product placement and movie commercials than they were about food advertising on the internet, websites and on social media.…”