Week 3 Thoughts

I would also like to start by thanking Stephanie and Liz for going to the cafeteria this week to speak with Gatekeepers. After reviewing my notes from last class again, I feel as though we have a good start at understanding our target population background and attempting to meet with Gatekeepers to gain more insight. I agree with Stephanie that it might better to arrange brief interviews with the other Gatekeepers we had in mind. I also like the idea of actually going to the cafeteria to eat lunch or dinner one day. I think we would benefit greatly from observing students and I think we could more clearly determine other influential ecological factors.

On a side note, I spent some time observing students at my school on Thursday and Friday when I have lunch duty and noticed some interesting things. My school is contracted with an Organics food company so most of the food the kids eat provided by the school is healthy and balanced. I noticed though that with the students that had home-made lunches, there was a mix of healthy and unhealthy components; for example I saw students with sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and then eating sugary fruit snacks and drinking a Monster energy drink or other carbonated beverage. I also noticed that some students did not have lunch that day and did not have money to buy lunch; even more interesting though was that students who were willing to give up some of their food from their lunches were more so willing to give up cut vegetable sticks and packed fruit. While I realize these are high school students, I think there is something to be said about the thought that goes into their food decisions and how that evolves or changes (or doesn't) as these students enter college. I bring this up because I am hypothesizing that for many of the younger college students, the healthier options (as we are focusing on) are going to be a topic of low interest or involvement and we should pay close attention to these trends when we go to the cafeteria, design our campaign materials, and when we do our focus group.