Personal Dietary Behavior

Great Essays
“Impact of Menu Designs and Personal Dietary Behaviors on Young Millennials’ Restaurant Menu Choice” written by Yuan Tian is an analysis of an on-line study conducted among 505 Millennials to assess the association between Millennials’ Calorie choices on food menus and a number of factors to include menu design, personal dietary behaviors and demographic characteristics.
As of 1980, the worldwide pervasiveness of obesity has increased, causing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enforce the Menu Calorie labelling Law. A large segment that contributes to this health crisis are the Millennials 18-24, therefore the study decided to focus on that particular segment. The results of this study, has been used and can continue to be used to
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The dependent variable is the subjects Calorie/menu choices. The researcher has posed three Research Question, and has identified a null and alternative hypothesis for each.
RQ1: Are young Millennials’ menu choices on low-Calories items correlated with different menu designs applying menu psychology?
Tian has created a null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis for each factor studied when considering the menu design to include the serial position effect, the gaze motion theory and the salience building method. (Tian, 2015).
RQ2: Are young Millennials’ menu choices on low-Calorie items correlated with personal dietary behavior and behavior change? (Tian, 2015).
H20: Young Millennials’ menu choices on low-Calorie items are not correlated with personal dietary behavior and behavior change
H21: Young Millennials’ menu choices on low-Calorie items are correlated with
Personal dietary behavior and behavior
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“The Office of Research Integrity - Human Subjects in University of Nevada, Las Vegas approved the exemption status of this study” (Tian, 2015).
Tian chose an analytical approach that is appropriate for the research questions being investigated and the data to be analyzed. The principle channel applied to collect data was MTurk. “MTurk is an online marketplace that provides businesses and developers access to an on-demand, scalable workforce” (Tian, 2015). An advantage of utilizing this is its function to collect responses throughout the U.S. in an effective way, facilitating the representativeness of the sample.
A dedicated Facebook page was created for the study and was sent to participants. Social media played an effective tool in the study, as it allowed participants to share, reaching a larger population. The survey was also distributed using email databases across college campuses, and shared with students in the nutrition/food science class. A few of these methods used relied on convenience sampling. This could be a fault of the survey, although it was not the primary method applied. The survey was conveniently distributed to one of the researchers class, which also happened to be a nutrition class, perhaps skewing the data, seeing the survey relied heavily on menu choices. Tables in the appendix showed a bias towards demographics to include race and education,

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