Completion Date

7-2015

Advisor(s)

Marilyn Tseng

Abstract

The food environment is increasingly thought to have a major influence on eating behavior. University campuses offer a unique opportunity to study the extent to which food environments influence eating, but such studies must be based on reliable measures. The objective of this project is to use a standard and reliable instrument, the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey (NEMS), to describe dining venues on the Cal Poly campus, and to compare Cal Poly food stores with off-campus alternatives. The five student investigators on this multidisciplinary, team-­based project will undergo training to use standard protocols to apply the NEMS to 18 campus dining venues, two campus food stores, and ~30 off‐campus supermarkets, groceries, and convenience stores in San Luis Obispo. Repeat assessments will allow for evaluation of inter­‐rater and test-retest reliability. Statistical analyses will include calculating prevalence of healthy and unhealthy constructs from the NEMS, comparing overall scores across venues, and comparing scores between on-­ and off-­campus stores. Findings will be used as a basis for future work to investigate the potential of modifying the Cal Poly food environment to facilitate students’ healthful food choices.

Copyright

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share

COinS