The impact of bias on developing healthy lifestyles, understanding if personal perspectives impact modeling and recommendations of diet and exercise by educators to their students.

Autor: Clark JE; Scientific Health: Education and Human Performance, Oakley, CA 94561 USA.; Los Medanos College, Brentwood Center, Brentwood, CA 94513 USA., Sirois E; Scientific Health: Education and Human Performance, Oakley, CA 94561 USA., Wiszniak MF; Scientific Health: Education and Human Performance, Oakley, CA 94561 USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Sport sciences for health [Sport Sci Health] 2023 Jan 27, pp. 1-13. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jan 27.
DOI: 10.1007/s11332-023-01042-2
Abstrakt: Purpose: Educators have an ability to imprint healthy behavior in children. Yet, little is known about how a bias by educators might impact imprinting on students. Therefore, we examined if educators' bias in opinions about diet and exercise influence the manner they are discussed with students.
Methods: 340 (144 F/196 M) educators from over 14 states (USA) provided responses regarding: personal opinions about and history of following diets or using exercise regimens; perspective on commonly held beliefs regarding diet, exercise, body image and morphology; and who should provide recommendations. Responses were tabulated for average and percentage with subsequent analysis by Pearson correlations or keyword frequencies of responses.
Results: Almost all (97%) understand social pressures related to body image and need to portray healthy behaviors to students. Bias was evident based on history of recommending or discouraging a specific diet ( r  = 0.77) or a dietary supplement ( r  = 0.66), recommending exercise they used ( r  = 0.89) or discouraging ones not used ( r  = 0.65). Most (85%) understand that social and mass media are not reliable sources, yet, relied on the same sources for information that reinforced their opinions.
Conclusion: Findings indicate (1) portrayal of healthy behaviors to students exist but expressed opinion that families have a greater influence than educators on healthy lifestyles, (2) there appears to be an unawareness of personal bias or expression of implicit bias toward behaviors projected to students, and (3) health/physical education and life science teachers may be able to act as a source of unbiased information to provide resources to a school site to aid in developing healthy lifestyles.
Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAuthors have no conflicts of interest with the publication of this manuscript.
(© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag Italia S.r.l., part of Springer Nature 2023, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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