Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 26, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 107-118
Appetite

Regular paper
Food and General Neophobia in Swedish Families: Parent–Child Comparisons and Relationships with Serving Specific Foods,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1006/appe.1996.0009Get rights and content

Abstract

The aims were to investigate the occurrence of food and general neophobia in Swedish families with children 2–17 years of age, parent–child correlations with respect to neophobia and the relationships between neophobia and the reported serving of specific foods in the family. A group of 370 randomly selected families from two Swedish towns (stratified, 185 from each) were invited and 57 (15%) participated. The results are based on the Food and General Neophobia Scales (Pliner & Hobden, 1992), parental ratings of child food neophobia and anad hocFood Frequency Questionnaire. The overall levels of neophobia were relatively low for both children and parents. There were only a few significant gender differences with respect to Food Neophobia but fathers and boys scored numerically higher than did mothers and girls on several items in the Food Neophobia Scale. The children, particularly boys, showed significantly higher Food and General Neophobia than their parents. Both Food and General Neophobia tended to decrease with increasing age among the children. Families were divided according to whether specific foods had been served or not. This classification showed virtually no relationship with the degree of food neophobia of family members. However, the higher the food neophobia in mothers and children, the fewer of the listed uncommon foods had been served in the family.

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This research was supported by grants from The Swedish Council for Forestry and Agricultural Research. The authors are indebted to Klara Halvarsson, Afsaneh Koochek and Katarina Lunner for assistance in data collection.

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Address correspondence to: Ulla-Kaisa Koivisto, Centre for Caring Sciences, University of Uppsala, Glunten, S-751 83 Uppsala, Sweden.

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