Research has shown that there are many benefits to families who communicate and have meals together. Families who sit together for meals are more likely to: eat more nutritiously, have teens that are less likely to be involved in risky behavior, and have children with better language skills and academic scores (The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, 2010). The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a "Meal Wheel" to promote parent and child conversation during meals among families with a history of child abuse and neglect. The Meal Wheel was a wooden Lazy Susan that had interchangeable picture frames containing conversation topics. Four families living in southern Illinois participated in the study as part of their parent training services received by Project 12-Ways. Two families received standard Project 12-Ways Meal Training which consisted of explaining, modeling, and prompting steps involved in completing the Meal Routine. The "Meal Wheel" was used with all four families during meal and limited instructions were given for completing steps within the meal routine. The results indicated increases in both parent and child positive verbals and decreases in negative affect and verbals for all 4 families who participated. The limitations of the study and its implications for families, especially families with a history of child abuse and neglect, are discussed.

INTRODUCTION: Obesity is a major public health concern for youth in the United States. Eating behaviors, such as meal skipping and eating family dinner, are associated with obesity. School connectedness and family connectedness assess the degree to which an individual feels that he or she belongs in an environment, and strong feelings of school connectedness are associated with decreased BMI. This study qualitatively evaluates the relationships between feelings of home and school connectedness and specific eating behaviors associated with obesity in an adolescent population. METHODS: Participants were recruited from an adolescent clinic at Boston Children's Hospital. Inclusion criteria for recruitment included adolescents who were: Black/ African American or Hispanic and non-White, between 13 and 19 years of age, and living in the Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, or Mattapan. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide, and participant data was analyzed by systematically identifying thematic language in the data by identifying similar phrases, patterns of descriptions, and notable disparities in participant content. RESULTS: 14 (10 females, 4 males; M=15.8 years of age) were enrolled and interviewed. Mean participant BMI was 27.3. 10 participants rarely/never skipped lunch, and 4 participants often/always skipped lunch. 6 participants ate dinner at home with their family always/ often, and 4 rarely/never ate dinner at home with their family. Most reported that their school's community, quality of education, and small environments were the most important aspects of their school. Of the 4 participants who attended school in the suburbs, 3 were connected or very connected to their school and disconnected from their neighborhoods. Every participant expressed feeling safe at school, but many cited lack of safety as their least favorite aspect of their neighborhood. Some reported that they felt safe, even though they knew that their neighborhoods were unsafe. CONCLUSION: Of the five students who felt 'very connected' to their schools, all but one always/often ate the food provided by their schools. These students discussed the ways in which their schools listened to student suggestions about school food. These feelings may suggest a stronger sense of feeling respected by one's school. Strong feelings of school connectedness in the majority of students who attend school in the suburbs warrant further exploration, as those who experience discordant home and school environments seemed more likely to embrace their school environment than their neighborhood environment. Furthermore, understanding how perceived neighborhood safety may contribute to feelings of home and neighborhood connectedness and possibly eating behaviors at or around home merits further examination.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to discover how college students conduct dinner groups and students' perceptions of the benefits and difficulties of participation. Design: Qualitative study conducted with seven focus groups. Setting: A university campus. Participants: Thirty-six college students participating in dinner groups. Dinner groups were defined as a group of ≥3 people cooking for each other (or together) and eating together ≥4 times a week. Analysis: The focus groups were recorded, transcribed, coded, and reconciled. NUDIST® NVivo software was used in identifying themes and subthemes. Results: Dinner groups were composed of roommates and/or other students living nearby. They rotated who made each dinner. Benefits identified included social interaction, increasing confidence in cooking, saving money and time, and eating more varied and healthier foods. Difficulties were mentioned but were much less common. They included increased time spent on days the student cooked and stresses related to cooking on a schedule. Students found that the benefits far outweighed the difficulties and universally wanted to continue in a dinner group. Conclusions and Implications: College students enjoy dinner groups and promoting them may be an option for improving college students' eating habits. Nearly all students felt that they ate better in a dinner group but research is needed to assess actual intake.

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The everyday dinner usually involves a number of different and sometimes conflicting ambitions that may include striving for self-fulfillment and striving to care for one’s family and society at large. To understand the consumption that occurs in connection with these ambitions, consumer researchers must understand the context surrounding the everyday dinner. In this dissertation theories of practice are utilized as a conceptual framework to emphasize the importance of context. Theories of practice have gained renewed interest within the field of consumption. Yet, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) has neglected practice theories’ ability to operationalize the consumption context. The aim of this dissertation is to develop further CCT’s practice perspective to increase the understanding of the consumption context and thereby better understand consumption as a social and cultural phenomenon. An ethnographic approach is employed to identify what practices operate within a complex consumption situation such as the everyday dinner among single mothers; how these practices incorporate consumption in their strivings and how the different practices operating within the consumption situation interact with one another. This new approach comes to the conclusion that mothering, defined as a meta-practice, dominated the consumption situation and organized the other practices involved. A meta-practice is one with major influence over consumption and thus a type of practice consumption researchers should look for. Furthermore in Western society consumption situations, like the everyday dinner, seem to be especially important when it comes to anchoring meta-practices and thereby the social order. A preliminary characterization of the meta-practice is proposed as consisting of four different traits: I) its impact on the social order; II) its generalizability, density and superiority; III) its regulation and IV) its stability or slow change. However, more studies are necessary to explore these characteristics further.

In an effort to determine differences between family dinners across generations, this study examined typical family dinners of participants and how they have changed across the four generations addressed. Previous qualitative research has been conducted to determine communication frames that occur during family dinners and the effect of parenting styles on family dinners, but little research connecting generational differences to family dinners has been published. Data were collected from a homogeneous sample of twenty-four women living in three counties across the Commonwealth of Kentucky. By asking open ended questions during interviews, similarities and differences between family dinners across generations were identified, and target approaches to increase the frequency of future family dinners were discussed.

Master of Science / Department of Food Science / Fadi Aramouni / Despite the expansion of the gluten-free (GF) food market, some GF food items are still characterized by an overall mediocre quality. The effects of different types of egg ingredients (fresh, whites, dried) and carob germ flour (CGF) as well as par-baking technology on the quality of dough-based gluten-free sorghum dinner rolls were evaluated. Gluten-free rolls containing 30% of fresh shell eggs or equivalent of egg products and 10% of CGF on a flour basis were evaluated against a control (no egg, no CGF). The feasibility of partial baking of rolls was studied on control as well as fresh eggs and carob germ flour formulas during 5 baking times (0, 8, 10, 12 and 18 minutes). Breads were evaluated for crumb and crust color, specific volume, cell profile, Texture Profile Analysis (TPA) and consumer acceptability. Results showed that rolls containing egg ingredients had higher specific volumes than control (p<0.05) with an increase from 1.45 cm[superscript]3/g to 1.96 cm[superscript]3/g. Carob germ flour did not have a significant effect on specific volume. Eggs also improved cell elongation and produced significantly darker crust (p<0.05). CGF did not appear to have an effect on cell elongation but increased average cell number when combined with egg ingredients, and greatly impacted rolls texture. The combination of fresh eggs or egg whites with CGF reduced significantly (p<0.05) crumb hardness from 2,074 to 1,404g and 1,468g of force respectively. Par-baked dinner rolls displayed similar color, volume, cell profile and texture trends to conventionally baked rolls. Sensory study revealed that acceptability, organoleptic characteristics and willingness to buy of par-baked dinner rolls could be similar to that of conventional wheat products. This research proved that the addition of eggs and CGF to a GF rolls formulation resulted in better overall quality of the product. Moreover, par-baking of the rolls showed great potential to provide safe, convenient and acceptable GF foods to celiac individuals.

This study contributes to an understanding of how coherence can be assigned or constructed by participants in authentic multiparty conversational interaction. Coherence is analysed as a type of organisation relevant for the making of meaning in situated interaction, but also in retrospect from a third party's (or analyst's) perspective; it is both constructed and reconstructed. Important questions are: what makes multiparty talk hold together, what do a number of participants in conversation (have to) do in order to sustain coherence, and in what senses can multiparty conversations be argued to be coherent? A notion of episode is (re)introduced as a unit of natural social interaction, manifest at a structurally intermediate, or a global. level of conversation. The use of episode implies that coherence, a pragmatic phenomenon, steadily encompasses text, i.e. talk, context(s) and actions, and sense-making practices invoking contexts during the progression of interaction. This reflects the reciprocal relations between länguage, social interaction, and cognition. Also, a coding method of coherence has been developed, Topical Episode Analysis (abbreviated as TEA). The thesis explores the concept of episode and its place among units of interaction, and describes the episode structure and coherence-making in some specific activity types. The empirical material used, 24 multiparty conversations making up a total of 1500 episodes, consists of dinner conversations among peers, multi-generational family gatherings (involving aphasics), radio talk shows, and conversations recorded at a centre aimed for elderly people (with symptoms of dementia). In all conversations, conversing is a main activity. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been carried out. Results include the following points: (i) coherence in multiparty conversation can be regarded as a co-construction; (ii) coherence is accomplished through the invoking of contexts (cotext, situation, and background knowledge), implying that coherence is an attribute of activities in context and not only 'text'; (iii) coherence-making is the unmarked case in authentic conversation and incoherence or non-coherence appear to be theoretical constructs; (iv) coherence patterns are activityspecific; (v) coherence is multilayered, consisting of one local and several global levels; (vi) coherence is constructed through a division of communicative labour, suggesting that also people with communicative impairments contribute to coherence-making.

In this study I draw on ethnographic research conducted from May 2009 to March 2010 to examine how diasporic and second-generation Iranians in Atlanta produce culture through their dinner parties. It is through these parties, I suggest, that representations of what it means to be Iranian and live in the United States are collectively negotiated as well as handed down to younger generations.