Science-Based Food Safety Education: Interactive Media Development for Hard-to-Reach and High-Risk Adolescents

Nationally, youth have increasing control over their food choices. This is especially true for high-risk and hard-to-reach youth who often spend much time without adult supervision, making decisions that affect the safety of the food they, and often younger siblings, eat. We expect that the resulting fun and educational online food safety activities will be used throughout the system to further the national food safety goals.
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1. Use focus groups and other qualitative methodologies to review key themes and messages in existing Fight BAC! materials. 2. Involve youth as designers to devise activities, stories, and characters that are interesting and compelling to the target audience. 3. Work with science educators and a nationally acclaimed microbiology food safety lab to develop activities that reveal science behind food safety practices. 4. Disseminate and model nationally, through Extension and other youth programs, the use of these materials with high-risk and underserved audiences. <p>
Our current activity has been to research and explore the relevance of Fight BAC! themes to adolescents and use findings to guide development of science-based exploration activities for target audience. We have done this through focus groups with members of our target audience at the middle school level. We received IRB human subjects clearance for this activity and are learning the commonly held beliefs in that age group which must be addressed if we are to develop an effective science-based food safety education program. Using focus groups and other qualitative methodologies, we are reviewing key themes and messages in existing Fight BAC! materials, comparing them to food preparation behaviors and attitudes of the target audience, and identifying food safety practices that are unclear or not relevant to this age group. This research is helping us identify ways in which the Fight BAC! messages can be made more relevant to the target audience, and ways in which scientific exploration can clarify the importance of food safety practices. We involve youth as designers to devise activities, stories, and characters that are interesting and compelling to the target audience.
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Nationally, youth have more and more control over their food choices. This is especially true for high-risk and hard-to-reach youth who often spend a great deal of time without adult supervision, making decisions that affect the safety of the food they, and often younger siblings, eat. We anticipate that the impact of this project will be to have expected that the resulting fun and educational online food safety activities will be used throughout the system to further the national food safety goals.