اتجاهات المراهقات نحو الوجبة الأسرية في مدينة الرياض

الملخص EN

The study objectives were to instigate the family meal patterns of female adolescents, identify factors that adolescents perceive as reasons for not eating meals with their family; know adolescents attitudes toward family meal; and to explore some of their demographic characteristics and their relationships with attitudes toward family meal.

Data were collected through personal interviews using questionnaire, for a simple systematic sample of 520 adolescent.

Percentages, mathematical means, standard deviations, and Spearman correlation coefficients, Likert scale, analyses of variance, LSD, were used to analyze the data.

The findings indicated that 74.8%, 95.6%, 92.9% of the adolescents attended the three major meals with family namely, breakfast, lunch and dinner, respectively, with significant difference at <0.01 between lunch meal and breakfast and dinner meals.

The difference in the average family weekly meeting between lunch and dinner and lunch and breakfast were 0.381 and 1.258, respectively.

The study revealed that female adolescents generally have a positive attitude toward family meal with a 2.27±0.31 general average for attitudes in Likert Scale of 3.0.

The highest mathematical means value was reported for three attitudinal statements: a) I prefer to have lunch with my family.

b) I enjoy having meals with my family.

c) Eating with family helps individual to having healthy food with better quality.

The lowest attitudes of adolescents were reported with the statements of: e) I prefer the home made food than food prepared in restaurants.

f) My eating habits are close to my parents.

g) It is an important tradition for my family to gather for breakfast meal.

It was also evident that 96.3% of the female adolescents conveyed positive and neutral attitudes toward family meal as compared to 3.7% with negative attitudes.

Housemaid presence has a significant negative impact (<0.01) on adolescent attitudes toward family meal.

It was concluded that extension and training programs related to family meal should be planned and executed in order to change neutral and negative attitudes toward family meal.