Using Data Analytics to Understand Children's Food Choice Behaviour

了解儿童的食物选择行为对于解决英国和其他地方儿童肥胖率高的问题至关重要。自动收集的食物选择数据为调查饮食模式提供了高质量和大量的来源，并可以揭示如何做出食物决策的有价值的见解。一些小学开始使用系统来登记学生从午餐菜单中选择的食物。这为探索这些新兴数据集提供了一个独特的机会，以了解它们的潜力，以及它们可以揭示儿童的食物选择行为。该项目将使用多所学校和整个学年的食物选择数据。食物选择将根据现有的社会人口特征（如学年组和免费校餐权利）进行审查，以调查儿童在学校食物环境中的食物选择模式。这种数据驱动的方法将为与儿童食物选择行为有关的食物选择模型和理论提供信息。此外，亦有空间探讨如何将数据与其他学校学生数据（例如学生的其他特徴、成绩）连系起来。在这方面，后勤和其他问题将进行审查，以探讨提供食物选择和这些学生因素之间的关系的关联证据的可能性。与外部合作伙伴SchoolGrid合作，这个跨学科项目将展示小学食物选择数据的潜力。研究结果将对政策和实践产生影响，并直接为未来干预措施的设计和实施提供信息，以改变儿童的食物选择行为，从而有助于改善儿童的饮食健康。

Understanding children's food choice behaviour is critical to addressing the high levels of childhood obesity in the UK and elsewhere. Automatically collected food choice data provide a high quality, and voluminous source for investigating dietary patterns and can reveal valuable insights to how food decisions are made. Some primary schools are beginning to utilise systems to register pupils' food selections from lunchtime menus. This now affords a unique opportunity to explore these emerging datasets in order to understand their potential, and what they can reveal about children's food choice behaviour.This project will use food choice data across multiple schools and for full academic years. Food choice will be scrutinised with respect to available sociodemographic characteristics (such as school year group and free school meal entitlement), in order to investigate children's food choice patterns within a school food environment. This data-driven approach will look to inform food choice models and theory relating to children's food choice behaviour. There is scope to explore data-linkage to additional school-held pupil data (e.g. further student characteristics, attainment). In relation to this, logistical and other issues will be examined, in order to explore the possibilities of providing associative evidence of relationships between food choice and these student factors. Working in collaboration with an external partner, SchoolGrid, this interdisciplinary project will demonstrate the potential of food choice data in primary schools. The intention is that findings will have policy and practice implications, and directly inform the design and delivery of future interventions to change children's food choice behaviour, thereby contributing towards improvements in children's dietary health.