Stage 5: Parents’ Interviews

Telephone interviews were conducted with parents as the final stage of data collection.

Different researchers have recommended parental interviews in order to corroborate statements made by children, to increase completeness of data and to obtain parents’

perspective on facilitating healthier lifestyles among children (Frank, 1994; Goodwin et al., 2001; Hart et al., 2003).

3.2.5.1 Objectives

The influence of parents on Maltese children’s food perceptions and intake had emerged clearly from the focus group interviews in Stage 4. Thus, parental role with regard to access to food, food provision and as a source of information on the health value of food were aspects of children’s food behaviours which I chose as the last areas to explore. This would also address different levels of McLeroy et al’s (1988) Social-Ecological Model, primarily the interpersonal and organisational levels. The main objectives of the parents’ interviews are outlined in Table 45.

TABLE 45

Main Objectives Of The Parents’ Interviews

• To uncover motivational factors for parents’ choice of foods for their children

• To identify parents’ opinions on school food policies

• To explore parental perceptions of children’s sources of food requests and subsequent outcomes of such requests

3.2.5.2 Choice Of Sample

During the period end of August to mid-September 2001, 30 telephone interviews were conducted with parents of children who had participated in the focus group interviews in June 2001. All those parents who had signed a Consent Form volunteering to be interviewed and returned it via their children to the Head of School were eligible to participate in the survey. Eventually, purposive sampling was used to choose the parents to be interviewed.

My goal was to include parents who had children attending different school types, who resided in different geographical regions and who had asked to be contacted during different periods of the day, perhaps reflecting different lifestyle routines. (See Table 46). All of the parents contacted in August reconfirmed their willingness to be interviewed. Twenty-six interviews were conducted during the day, between 9.00 a.m. and 5.30 p.m. Four of the interviews were conducted after 7.00 p.m. Out of the 30 interviewees only one was the male parent. Moreover, though not asked directly, it emerged during the course of the

conversations that a mix of working and non-working mothers were interviewed, with the sample more biased towards the latter.

3.2.5.3 Methodology

Telephone interviews are a popular alternative to in-person interviews for health-related studies, with such advantages as a high response rate, speed of data gathering, low cost for

TABLE 46

Attributes Of The Parents’ Interviews Interview 1 Mother Boy Trans-island Independent Mixed

2 Mother Girl Trans-island Church Girls Grandmother is Italian

3 Mother Boy Trans-island Church Boys

8 Mother Girl Trans-island Independent Mixed

9 Mother Girl Trans-island Independent Mixed Mother is British

10 Mother Girl Malta, Urban State Mixed

11 Mother Boy Malta, Urban State Mixed

12 Mother Girl Trans-island Church Girls Mother is a member of the School PTA 13 Mother Girl Trans-island Independent Mixed

14 Mother Girl Malta, Urban State Mixed Mother is a member of

18 Mother Boy Trans-island Independent Mixed

19 Mother Boy Malta, Urban State Mixed

27 Father Girl Trans-island Independent Mixed Father said he was answering on behalf of a In order of implementation

implementation and good quality of data collected (Derr et al., 1992). Interviews with parents have been used for different purposes in food research, including the development of a research tool to assess children’s eating habits (Wardle et al., 2001a), evaluation of the impact of a nutrition education programme on children’s food intake (Koblinsky, Guthrie &

Lynch, 1992), exploration of parents’ perspective on improving children’s lifestyle choices (Hart et al., 2003) and examination of relationships between the presence of television during meals and children’ food consumption patterns (Coon et al., 2001). The goals of such interviews were to obtain a richer or more precise background on children’s food-related practices.

Telephone interviews were chosen for Stage 5 of the research as these would be easy to organise logistically. Parents would be reached in the comfort of their home and at their convenience. Similarly, I could conduct the interviews from one location (my home), avoiding the burden of travelling from one place to another and incurring any transportation costs.

Since the interviews were scheduled for the Summer months, such a set up was much more practical than organising a meeting with parents, perhaps on the school premises. The latter may have even compromised the quality of the data and the openness of the interviewees.

In fact, during the interviews I sensed that parents were very candid in their comments, both with regard to their own, or their children’s behaviours, but also in relation to certain school food-related policies and practices.

3.2.5.4 Research Tool

A standard interview guide was followed for each interview (see Appendix 3.11), although the order of questions sometimes changed depending on the previous responses of the interviewee. There were eleven questions in total, addressing three domains as seen in Table 47. I decided to keep the tool as simple as possible and the focus limited to three areas in the interest of efficiency and to reduce the burden on interviewees. Moreover, I had learnt from my experience in conducting the children’s focus groups that addressing quite a number of topics would result in an overwhelming amount of data to be analysed. The interview guide was piloted with two mothers, but no modifications were necessary.

3.2.5.5 Data Collection Procedure

The telephone interviews were conducted according to the time preference indicated by the parents in their Consent Form. Thus, a high response rate was ascertained beforehand. At the beginning of the interview I introduced myself and explained the purpose of the phone

TABLE 47

Domains In The Parents’ Interview Guide

Domain Number of

questions Motivational factors for parents’ choice of foods for consumption by children

3 Parents’ opinions, behaviours and suggestions in relation to school food policies

5 Parents’ perspectives on children’s food requests

3

call, referring to the Consent Form and their children’s participation in a survey a few weeks earlier. I then explained that the interview would last approximately 15 minutes and that it tackled three main areas. In reality, the interviews lasted between 10 to 30 minutes. All the parents co-operated fully, many offering to be interviewed further at a later date if necessary.

Some parents were very willing to talk at length about the issues raised, particularly mothers who turned out to be members of the School Council. There were two such cases, a mother whose child attended a state school and a mother whose child attended a church school.

3.2.5.6 Data Recording And Analysis

During the interviews I made extensive notes, taking down direct quotes when striking statements were made. After each interview, I revised these notes and filled in any gaps from memory. A similar process to that used when analysing the children’s focus group interviews was adopted, following the conventions of inductive analysis methods (Strauss &

Corbin, 1990; Miles & Huberman, 1994). All notes were transferred into an Excel

spreadsheet, categorised according to the interview questions. Within each category, the parents’ responses were then coded according to emergent themes and sub-themes.

Revision of these themes indicated a number of areas of overlap and led to further

consolidation. Eventually a number of descriptive tables with themes and sub-themes were developed to synthesise the data obtained. A record was made of similar responses to indicate saliency.

As with the children’s focus groups, certain steps were taken to ensure trustworthiness of the analysis (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). My interview notes and comments written immediately after each interview, as well as the hard copies of the coding sequence were kept as an audit trail of the analysis. A fellow-researcher was consulted regarding the coding system used and the emergent themes and sub-themes and appropriateness of illustrative quotes. This audit trail and review were used as methods of verification of credibility of the analysis. Thick

description was also presented in writing up the results with the purpose of adding to credibility and facilitating decisions on transferability by other researchers.

3.2.5.7 Limitations

The parent sample was selected from a group of parents who had volunteered to participate in the interviews. This group of parents was perhaps not representative of the general population as their offer to be part of the study may have resulted from an interest in the topic of children’s diet and health. Thus, a certain bias in their perception of the importance of health in choosing foods could have been present. All the interviewees, except one, were mothers. Fathers may have offered a different perspective on the issues discussed and added to the richness of the data obtained. Nonetheless, in the request for volunteers I had asked that the person who normally provided the children’s food would be available; so the fact that mainly mothers were the interviewees is indicative that this role is more or less still exclusive to the maternal domain. All the interviews were conducted during the Summer months and this may have biased parents’ responses on their children’s recent food requests: the latter could have been related to seasonal availability or preference for foods, or influenced by seasonality in advertised foods.

3.3 Conclusion

This chapter has given a detailed overview of the methodology involved in the five different stages of the research. The choice of methods and research tools for each stage were based on a study of the literature, on the outcomes of preceding stages in the research and related to my wish to employ diverse techniques and to trial certain methodologies with Maltese school children. Results from the first two stages were described in order to give richer meaning to various aspects of the subsequent stages. Results from Stages 3 to 5 will now be presented and discussed in the following chapter.