Advancing New Methodological Approaches to Measure Social Decisions: The Case of Eating in a Family Context

Social inequalities in health are a key challenge and can be largely traced back to social differences in health behaviours, such as food decisions. Food decisions are one of the key behaviours to preserve health and prevent chronic degenerative diseases, which are the major cause of death in Western countries. Yet surprisingly little is known about how, when, where, and by whom these food decisions are made. The goal of the proposed research project is to further develop and apply a multi-method approach that combines methods from informatics, sociology, and psychology to better understand everyday social decisions, using the example of family food decisions. Developing such externally valid methods that take the social context into account is central to better understand the inequalities in nutrition and health.