Mid-Atlantic Diary Association Project Update
Formative Research with Low-income Students

Allison Karpyn, Research Consultant

In the past several months significant progress has been made in executing the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association Nutrition Education Formative Research project.

The project, a partnership between the Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Network (PA NEN) (coordinated by the PA NEN Steering Committee and other PA NEN volunteers) and the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association, has two core objectives:

1. To understand the types of nutrition issues relevant to low-income teen-aged students
2. To decipher in what form these students are interested in learning about these issues.

A secondary objective is to understand students’ perception of parents’ roles in the eating behaviors of teenagers.

To date, fifty-one children ages 12 to 14 have participated in seven discussion groups about the food they eat and the information they see, read, or hear about food in school and in the community.

Focus groups have included both boys and girls, interviewed separately, in both rural and urban settings of Erie and Reading, Pennsylvania. The two-hour groups occurred both in school and in after-school settings during the months of March and April.

Results will be released following the completion of the eighth group, which we hope to schedule for this month. When all of the data is collected, a report that will be made available on the PA NEN web site.