Qualitative Study on the Perception of an Unbalanced Diet from the Viewpoint of Elementary School Students

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of an unbalanced diet by elementary school students using a qualitative approach to nutrition counseling. To achieve the purpose of this study, client-centered counseling was performed over one semester with four volunteer children in the fifth grade who admitted eating an unbalanced diet. Their perceptions of an unbalanced diet were examined while focusing on cause. The contents of the counseling sessions were recorded and their eating habits observed. The proposed perceptions of the clients of an unbalanced diet were as follows regarding the causes of an unbalanced diet, there may have been a certain negative event or memory related to food as well as an individual disease or history of disease; regarding the meaning of an unbalanced diet, the clients had two kinds of time concepts (formal one and informal one) and defined the meaning of an unbalanced diet as a matter of being able to eat proper amounts of food within an inter-meal time; and regarding the results of an unbalanced diet, they based their results on the approval of their parents and teachers. Feeding at school was used as the background of this study, which examined the meanings and results of an unbalanced diet, and there existed a correlation between the meanings and the results.