Dai Jane, Zulkefli Nur Fadzlina, Moy Foong Ming, Humphries Debbie L
Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA.
Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
J Nutr Educ Behav. 2022 Feb;54(2):143-150. doi: 10.1016/j.jneb.2021.08.019. Epub 2021 Dec 21.
To explore how working women in metropolitan Malaysia make food decisions.
A grounded theory approach and semistructured interviews.
A large university in metropolitan Malaysia.
Twenty-four female employees purposively recruited to vary in ethnicity, body mass index, age, and marital status via convenience sampling.
Perceptions of sociocultural influences on healthy eating behavior among working women.
Researchers audio-recorded interviews and analyzed verbatim transcripts.
Working women shared a desire to eat a healthier, more balanced diet by reducing processed food consumption through home-cooked meals. Participants described aspects of their living situations and cultural values about food that made it seem impossible to change their diets. Living with other people limited their ability to cook the food they wanted to eat. In addition, unspoken rules about communal eating in Malaysia, such as not refusing food and not wasting food, prevented working women from practicing healthy eating.
In this population of working women in metropolitan Malaysia, experiences of time scarcity and limited sociocultural support for behavior change were major barriers to healthy eating. Interventions could prioritize leveraging these realities about food to facilitate environments in which women feel like they have control of their own food intake.
探讨马来西亚大都市职业女性如何做出食物选择。
扎根理论方法和半结构化访谈。
马来西亚大都市的一所大型大学。
通过便利抽样有意招募了24名女性员工，她们在种族、体重指数、年龄和婚姻状况方面存在差异。
职业女性对社会文化对健康饮食行为影响的认知。
研究人员对访谈进行录音，并逐字分析笔录。
职业女性都希望通过减少加工食品消费、选择在家做饭来实现更健康、更均衡的饮食。参与者描述了她们的生活状况以及关于食物的文化价值观，这些使她们似乎无法改变饮食习惯。与他人同住限制了她们烹饪想吃食物的能力。此外，马来西亚关于 communal eating 的一些不成文规定，比如不拒绝食物和不浪费食物，阻碍了职业女性践行健康饮食。
在马来西亚大都市的这群职业女性中，时间稀缺以及社会文化对行为改变的支持有限是健康饮食的主要障碍。干预措施可以优先利用这些与食物相关的现实情况，营造让女性觉得能够掌控自己食物摄入量的环境。
