Sekar Raju, Priyali Rajagopal, & Timothy J. Gilbride

Marketing Healthful Eating to Children: The Effectiveness of Incentives, Pledges, and Competitions
This research examines how school administrators can motivate children to make more healthful food choices using incentives, pledges, and competitions as interventions. A six-month field study was conducted across 55 elementary and middle schools, and the authors analyzed the data using a two-level Bayesian hierarchical linear model. All three interventions increased the choice of fruits and vegetables (the proportion of children choosing additional servings increased 3 to 24 percentage points) ten weeks after the interventions ended. However, younger (Grades 1 and 2) and older (Grades 3–8) children responded differently to the interventions. Although both younger and older children responded more favorably to the competition intervention than to the pledge or incentive interventions, the effects of the competition and incentive interventions were more pronounced among the younger children. A second field study, also with schoolchildren, examined the role of pledge reminders on adherence to the pledge. The presence of a visible reminder of a pledge resulted in significantly better outcomes than no reminder of a pledge. Keywords: children, healthful eating, competition, pledge, incentives, cognitive development, hierarchical Bayesian linear models

esearch has shown that it is easier to develop healthful eating habits among children than among adults (Klein-Hessling, Lohaus, and Ball 2005) and that eating patterns established in childhood tend to persist throughout life (Lien, Lytle, and Klepp 2001; Lowe et al. 2004). However, statistics indicate that children fail to meet the recommended daily consumption levels of fruits and vegetables in the United States (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2001). For example, one study reports that only 5% of elementary and middle schoolchildren meet the recommended servings of