The objective of this study was to make practical suggestions to prevent and correct problematic eating attitudes by analyzing factors influencing elementary school students' eating attitudes and to provide basic materials for developing correct dieta...
The objective of this study was to make practical suggestions to prevent and correct problematic eating attitudes by analyzing factors influencing elementary school students' eating attitudes and to provide basic materials for developing correct dietary habits and promoting physical and mental health.
This study conducted a questionnaire survey of 425 fifth and sixth graders in elementary schools in Jeonbuk and performed reliability, frequencies, χ^(2)-test, correlations, regression and t-test to analyze replies of 405 students, excluding insincere ones. The results of these analyses are as follows.
First, according to the result of analyzing correlations of elementary school students' eating attitudes with nutrition knowledge, bodily image, self-esteem, relationship with parents, school adjustment and mass media, children's eating attitudes appeared to be in statistically significant relationships with all these factors.
Second, this study formulated a hypothesis that individual factors, which were nutrition knowledge, bodily image, self-esteem and environmental factors, which were relationship with parents, school adjustment, mass media, would influence elementary school students' eating attitudes. According to the result of verifying the hypothesis, nutrition knowledge and bodily image out of the individual factors and relationship with parents and mass media appeared to influence elementary school ,students' eating attitudes. In addition, the most influential factor among the individual factors was bodily image and next nutrition knowledge, and that among the environmental factors was the mass media, and next relationship with parents.
Third, this study formulated a hypothesis that students' gender would affect their eating attitudes. According to the result of analysis, there was a difference between male and female students, but not statistically significant.