GOAL SETTING FOR HEALTH BEHAVIOR CHANGE AMONG CHILDREN

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DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Description) Inadequate intakes of fruit and vegetables (F&V) are associated with increased risks for cancer. Interventions directed at improving dietary behavior often include goal setting as an integral component. However, little is known about how, or how often, children set goals, or of the effectiveness of adult goal setting procedures among children. This pilot study will investigate children's processes of goal setting to increase consumption of F&V. The first two studies (focus groups and interviews) will describe the specific components of existing goal setting practices among children from several ethnic groups both to understand the effect of cultural patterns on goal setting, and to make the results maximally useful to diverse groups of children. It will include children from two different developmental levels (fourth and eighth grades) to understand the effect of maturity of goal setting, and enable the design of procedures appropriate for different age groups. We believe that describing children's existing goal setting practices will enable us to design more effective interventions to enhance their goal setting in the future. Based on the first two studies, an intervention study will enable us to intensively analyze three components of children's successful goal setting processes likely to be important, e.g., global vs. specific goals, self-selected vs. other-imposed goals, and the use of a strategic action plan. We believe that this will lead to a series of studies testing the effectiveness of procedures to enhance children's goal setting processes. Ensuing dietary behavior change interventions should be more effective if they include these effective goal setting procedures by providing more pertinent instruction and guided practice.