The University of Cambridge aimed to conduct research to understand how people’s opinions about health eating policies can be affected by different presentation of the policies effectiveness.
Respondents were shown 1 of 5 images at random, each displaying a different level of information regarding a healthy eating intervention for a café/restaurant, and then asked questions based on the information which they had read. OnePoll worked with the client on various versions of the survey to ensure that the design matched their needs, including a soft launch & review of the early data.
This research was conducted in England only via an online quantitative survey, to an enlarged sample of 4500 English adults (nationally representative for age, gender, region and educational attainment). This was done to ensure a robust sample size for each of the different interventions. The information in the healthy eating interventions related to levels of obesity in England, along with details of a study which was conducted to test if replacing higher calorie foods with lower calorie foods, or reducing portion sizes of higher calorie foods would be effective at reducing calories eaten. After seeing 1 of the 5 randomly assigned images, respondents were asked about their support for these changes, along with recall. Information on educational attainment, ethnicity and BMI was also collected.
OnePoll delivered data tables and an executive summary of the topline data. Data tables had cross-breaks including which intervention respondents saw to discover whether the level of information altered what people thought about the effectiveness of the changes, and if it altered support for the changes. Those who were given the least amount of information, were most likely to oppose making both of the proposed changes (15%, with next highest being 12%), however they were also most likely to agree that the information presented was clear (93%, with the next highest being 90%).
The University of Cambridge team hoped the research would help them to understand how people interpret evidence about the effectiveness of healthy eating strategies.
