Associations among food store selection, socio-demographic characteristics, food served in the home, and child diet and weight status in low-income, ethnically diverse families in Texas

This dissertation will address associations among socio-demographic characteristics, the neighborhood food environment, the home food environment, child dietary behaviors, and child weight status. Participants of this study were predominantly low-income, ethnically diverse Hispanic or Latino families in Austin and Houston, Texas (n=1560). The first journal article contributes to the area of the neighborhood food environment, an area that has been debated among researchers and is not uniformly measured, by assessing the significance of socio-demographic characteristics on food store selection. Findings from this study revealed many significant associations with food store selections, including the observation that participants who only spoke a foreign language and who were born outside of the U.S. typically shop at healthier food stores. The second journal article presents a novel approach to better understanding the home food environment by incorporating the food store selections of participants and identifying associations between food store selections and frequencies that various foods were served in the home. Food store selections that were healthy were associated with serving healthy foods in the home more often, while less healthy food store selections were associated with serving unhealthy foods in the home more often. The third journal article examined the association between foods served in the home and child diet and weight status. Foods served in the home were significantly associated with foods consumed by children and child weight status, although fewer associations were observed with child weight status. Multilevel logistic, multinomial logistic, and multilevel linear regressions were used for analyses