Experimental Design
This online experiment will take place in the Spring of 2022. Each participant will be asked to complete an around 30 minutes online survey. We aim to recruit approximately 750 respondents with the help of Qualtrics.
Before initiating the survey, the legal parent or guardian will provide consent for their child to participate in the study, if they choose to proceed with the survey, implied consent is given. Then, parents or legal guardians will be asked screening questions about their child (age and race), their home address, and their email address. Their home address would be used only to deliver the food selected by their child in the survey if randomly selected to receive the food delivery.
Following parent consent, adolescents will give their assent to participate and indicate their race and age before proceeding to make sure they meet our participants’ criteria. Again, if they choose to proceed with the survey, implied consent is given. Firstly, adolescents will be asked about their sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, school grade, race, state).
At the beginning of the survey, adolescents will report their emotions using the PANAS and their hunger level. We will randomly assign adolescents to one of the three emotion conditions: positive, neutral, and negative. Participants will be asked to carefully watch two 2-minute film clips validated to elicit the targeted emotion (positive, neutral, or negative). At the beginning and at the of the film clips, and between the two emotion-eliciting film clips, participants will be randomly assigned to one of the two advertising conditions: food advertisement and non-food advertisement. Participants in the food advertisement conditions will watch three 30-seconds advertisements about food products. Participants in the non-food advertisement conditions will watch three 30-seconds advertisements about non-food products.
We will then collect again participants’ emotions using the PANAS and hunger level. Participants will then begin a food decision phase. Twenty food items of similar prices will be displayed on the screen in random order, to avoid order effects. We will present participants with healthy and unhealthy options: among the 20 food items, 10 will be healthy (5 sweet and 5 salty) and 10 unhealthy (5 sweet and 5 salty). Participants will be asked to select the 5 items they would like to eat. They will also be informed that 15% of the respondents will be randomly drawn to receive their selected food items via mail.
Before leaving the study, we also collect the perceived healthfulness and taste of the foods offered, the presence of restrained eating, food eaten and drank during the last seven days, emotion regulation, online time use, and self-reported height and weight.