Adolescents' Nutritional Knowledge

Monday, 30 October 2017

Marie Tse-Valcin, DNP
Pediatric Department, Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Nutrition is an important component in maintaining optimal health. Adolescents are at the right stage on the continuum of vitality, to incorporate change in their lives. Adolescent nutrition has always been a concern to doctors and researchers. The food choices adolescents make may not have immediate or noticeable effects on their bodies. This can create long-term problems in the future, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and strokes. Therefore, helping adolescents become more knowledgeable and conscientious of their dietary habits is important. The goal of identifying whether adolescents have good nutritional knowledge to make good nutritional choices will help clinicians provide adolescent-centered strategies to improve the adolescents' overall health before adulthood. The literature has shown that many studies were done on adolescent nutrition. The outcomes were not statistically significant, but the findings suggested that adolescents’ nutritional knowledge was low in general. The theoretical framework to be implemented during the course of the study is the Nola Pender’s Health Promotional Model (HPM). The HPM has various activities that are directed toward the development of resources that maintain an individual’s health and/or well-being. The target population will include males and females of all ethnicities, between the ages of 11-19 years old. A total of 80 students are needed in order to establish a correlation among the variables in this study. A cross-sectional design will be used to distribute the two questionnaires at the study site. The researcher will issue informed consent forms and will collect them at the given deadline. The researcher and assistant will issue and collect the two questionnaires: Nutritional Knowledge Instrument (NKI) and Nutritional Self-Reported Questionnaire (NSRQ). The data will be analyzed by using Pearson’s r to test for correlation between the two variables. The correlation coefficient (r) obtained will tell the extent and the type of relationship between the two variables.