Name, Rank & Cereal Number

COMMUNICATION FACULTY BLEND TEACHING, RESEARCH AND FOOD POLICY

Dr. Matt Ritter, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication & Dr. Sarah Vaala, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication

It started one day as an office brainstorming session. Hands-on experience is vital to student learning and we were feverishly attempting to conceptualize a project that could integrate the ideas we were teaching in our respective course sections of Research Methods with actual research. It ended as a published manuscript calling on manufacturers to rethink how they market ready-to-eat cereals to children.

Back to the brainstorming session. Both of us have young children and understand the frustration many parents face walking down the cereal aisle at the supermarket. Bombarding those little eyes is a barrage of not-so-clandestine messages designed to convince children of the pleasurable merits

of consuming breakfast cereals, especially those high in sugar. We reasoned that examining cereal packaging might be of interest to our strategic communication students — many of them plan to pursue marketing careers. Our respective research interests intersected in the cereal aisle too — Dr. Vaala has studied the impact of licensed media characters on children’s impressions of cereal taste, while Dr. Ritter has examined how the fast food industry modified its advertising practices in the 1990s in response to the growing childhood obesity epidemic.

Dr. Vaala asked, “Why not buy some cereal boxes and have the students code those?” A content analysis could interweave our respective interests by documenting child-oriented features on cereal

packaging, in light of food industry self-regulatory advertising policies that have evolved over the past decade. We estimated that we would need five to 10 students to code enough boxes in detail to yield meaningful findings. And unlike our typical research participants, cereal boxes do not have to give informed consent, so we could get started right away.

And so it began. On a stormy day in early September 2018, all eyes in the High Point Walmart were on the two professors and two students herding ten carts full of cereal toward the checkout line. On campus, more students pitched in to unload the hundreds of boxes of cereal. We numbered each box, ordered them into bags and put out the call to students in our classes to help in the process of coding.

Establishing Intercoder Reliability – A Master Class in Growth Mindset

A major challenge of any research involving coding is ensuring that coders are unified in what they see — taking a subjective concept and turning it into an objective measure that each coder applies the same way. This meant we had to train our student assistants to spot specific child-targeted features and nutrition information and consistently apply the codes in our coding scheme, and then repeatedly test whether they each recorded identical codes for the same boxes (reliability). To say the process can be tedious and frustrating is an understatement. The students studied the codes, then practiced them on boxes not in our sample, compared scores, resolved disagreements, revised the coding scheme and studied the codes all over again. We studied, practiced, compared scores and studied again right along with them — showing them firsthand that intercoder reliability needs to be practiced and refined, whether you are a study author or research assistant. Our study’s success depended on a collective growth mindset: each of us committing ourselves to practicing and refining until our individual approaches were indistinguishable from each other. Finally, after several months, we were ready to code the official study cereal boxes.

Students pored over each box, identifying cereal mascots like Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam, games, prizes and fun cereal shapes. To facilitate the coding process, we built a tool using our HPU Qualtrics accounts, which cued students to input a response for each possible code. On any given day on the third floor of the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication one might have found a handful of students surrounded by boxes of cereal, carefully entering the information into their laptops. It was a slow process to be sure, yet one we sped up with a pizza party for the students one evening. Although we called it a coding party, “party” was probably a misnomer. Still the students seemed to enjoy being involved in a project they knew had the potential to make a difference.

The Scoop: Cereal Offenders Going Against the Grain

The data collected by the students was key to our research. We first divided the cereals by manufacturer. We were most interested in those manufactures (Post, Kellogg’s, etc.) that had signed on to the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), an industry selfregulation initiative designed to limit the way unhealthy foods and beverages are advertised to children.

Our attention then turned to serving sizes and sugar content. Other researchers have shown that people rarely pay attention to the suggested serving size, opting rather to consume the amount of cereal that satisfies their hunger. This often means people are consuming more than the recommended amount. Those extra servings increase the amount of daily sugar intake, which according to national nutrition standards should be less than 6g per ounce of cereal. A cereal sold

High Point University students Wyatt Gray and Jack Elliott help purchase more than 200 boxes of cereal from a local Walmart.

by a manufacturer participating in the CFBAI opposite, in fact. Cereals that met the standards must meet certain nutrition criteria, including (12g of sugar or less per suggested serving) had added sugar levels of 12g or less per serving, in lower density, and thus smaller serving sizes on order to be advertised to children on television or average. Once we applied the sugar per ounce the internet. Our research explored that margin standard instead of sugar per serving, we found between what is considered healthy and what can that manufacturers were promoting high sugar be advertised to children. Does the CFBAI sugar per ounce cereal to children by way of childper serving guideline translate into relatively low oriented features on the box. All of the cereals sugar per ounce cereals? And do manufacturers that manufacturers specifically listed in reports as apply the same standards to packaging as they do meeting criteria to advertise to children indeed to TV ads? contained 12g of sugar While parents may think they or less per serving. Interestingly, nutrition are serving their children healthy However, 65% of these panel information on cereal, that may not be the case. products fell into our ready-to-eat cereal is “high sugar per ounce” based on manufacturer suggested serving. Because category, containing more than 9g (more than 2 serving sizes vary by cereal weight, it is more teaspoons) of sugar in an ounce of cereal. What difficult for consumers to monitor their sugar is more, they had 3.5 child-targeting features per intake, especially if they are in the habit of pouring box on average. As a point of reference, the the same amount in their bowl each day. What federal government requires that cereal contain consumers need is a standardized measure like less than 6g of sugar per ounce to be eligible sugar per ounce that remains consistent across all for purchase under the Women, Infants and manufacturers and cereal types. Children (WIC) program. Our analysis revealed that manufacturers have In short, cereals that would be classified as having become rather adept at creating cereals that keep a moderate amount of sugar under the per serving them CFBAI-compliant. But that does not mean metric often have a high amount of sugar under those cereals are necessarily healthy. Quite the

the per ounce metric and are heavily marketed to kids through their packaging. While parents may think they are serving their children healthy cereal, that may not be the case. On the other hand, almost none of the lowest sugar cereals displayed features that would appeal to children, likely lowering the chances that kids would ask for these healthier products.

The research, titled “Child-Oriented Marketing on Cereal Packaging: Associations with Sugar Content and Manufacturer Pledge,” appeared as the lead article in the Journal of Nutrition and Education Behavior March 2020 edition. The journal serves as a go-to resource for nutrition educators. We also presented on a digital panel at the International Communication Association in May 2020, ensuring the findings reach a global audience of both health practitioners and academics.

So Happy Together: Integrating Research Into the Classroom

We are most proud of the way the project interwove classroom instruction, faculty research and skills students can use in everyday life.

Senior strategic communication major Jack Elliot said his work on the project has taught him to be meticulous. Elliot was tasked with creating a repository of photos of each box of cereal. The photos were indexed and later used for recording nutrition information.

Other students also played a more prominent role, taking the skills they learned and applying them in graduate school. Eric Small, a senior in the BA/MA in strategic communication program, was a student in Dr. Vaala’s Research Methods in Strategic Communication course. Small, who was entertaining the possibility of graduate school at the time, stepped up early on to take on additional responsibilities on the project. He crafted an abstract, designed a poster and traveled with Dr. Vaala to Fairfax, Virginia, to present some of the early findings at the D.C. Health Communication Conference, a consortium of professionals interested in health communication research and practice. Small’s costs were funded through a grant from High Point University’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Works, which supports faculty in the nurturing of students interested in research. The value of the experience was priceless. “I definitely think that it will help

Open Door Ministries received more than 200 boxes of cereal from the research. The cereal was used to help feed members of the community in need of food assistance.