REPORT
Nutrition Intervention Strategies Preferred by Parents:
Results of a Marketing Survey
SUSAN J. CROCKETT,l CHERYL L. PERRY,2
AND PHYLLIS PIRIE 2
1 Food and Nutrition Department, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58105; and
2 Division of Epidemiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55355
INTRODUCTION
Society's health care needs are changing, and nutrition
educators are faced with an era in which traditional strat-
egies for providing nutrition care and education are also
changing. Nutrition educators can no longer plan inter-
ventions according to their own interests and priorities,
assuming that their target audience will share their views;
neither can they take an inflexible stance about educa-
tional strategies, ignoring the changing life-styles of their
clients (1).
This report illustrates the application of the social mar-
keting concept (2) as part of the planning process of a
youth-directed intervention with a strong parent com-
ponent. When this survey was conducted, the authors
had had considerable experience in planning and imple-
menting school-based nutrition education programs as
part of the Minnesota Heart Health Program (3). In ad-
dition, they had just evaluated parent responses to four
youth-directed health and nutrition interventions (4) and
learned that parents may be hard to reach. Nevertheless,
they were convinced that parent education is vitally im-
portant when seeking to positively impact the health
behavior of children (5,6).
Therefore, to strengthen their ongoing nutrition ed-
ucation efforts for elementary school children, the au-
thors determined to add a parent education component.
The marketing survey was conducted to better under-
stand the preferred education strategies and opinions of
parents, so that intervention techniques which meshed
with their preferences could be devised. This paper de-
Correspondence should be directed to Susan J. Crockett, 351D Food
and Nutrition Department, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND
58105.
0022-3182/89/2102-0090$02.00/0
1989 SOCIETY FOR NUTRITION EDUCATION
90
scribes the results of that marketing survey and the in-
tervention that was developed based on the data gath-
ered.
METHODS
Parent survey. Randomly selected mothers (n = 119)
or fathers (n = 89) of fourth-grade children in 208 dif-
ferent families were surveyed. The parents were middle
class, well educated, and resided in a target community
of the Minnesota Heart Health Program which is pre-
dominantly Caucasian. An intervention was planned for
elementary age children who were old enough to read,
and who were mature enough to complete certain food
preparation and selection tasks. It was felt that third or
fourth graders would be the ideal target audience. The
random sample of 220 parents was selected from a list
of names of all parents of fourth graders in the community
public school system (n = 1080). Table 1 summarizes
background information about the respondents.
A telephone data collection method was chosen be-
cause previous experience had shown that response rates
from this method were much higher than those in mailed
surveys. A carefully trained and supervised group of tele-
phone interviewers collected data and obtained a re-
sponse rate of 95% (208/220). Building on previous ex-
perience with this data gathering technique, the questions
were specifically designed for a telephone survey format.
Focus group interviews with parents were conducted,
and the literature surveyed to determine what methods
had been used in previous school-based interventions
targeting parents. The final questions were chosen to
elicit parental reactions to these ideas and approaches.
Test-retest reliability of the questions was not deter-
mined.
Parents were asked to state whether they thought each