A model for the development of an instructional system for designing food safety instruction for adult consumers.

摘要

Providing consumers with accurate food safety information on which to base personal food safety choices is a major concern of public health officials today. Consumer research and epidemiological evidence show that the current limited food safety education intervention efforts aimed at adults are not successful. Furthermore, there are no data to show that the current educational programs are based on educational theories or concepts.;Approaches to other public health education issues, e.g., educating consumers about nutrition, are effective when they are based on educational theories and concepts in order to achieve specified learning goals. Experts in the health and nutrition fields have advocated the use of disciplined approaches, i.e., models for instructional design, in order to result in the transfer of knowledge to enable adults to modify their behaviors in positive ways. As in the case of health and nutrition education, an instructional model for designing food safety educational programs that incorporates the views of food safety education experts and practitioners on the components of such a model could promote the success of food safety education interventions.;The purpose of the study was to gather and use the views of 20 food safety experts to develop a model for the design of food safety instruction for adult consumers. This was accomplished by identifying the components of an instructional model aimed at providing adults with food safety information using a modified Delphi technique involving structured interviews with the experts; developing a tentative model that represented a composite of the views of the experts about the components of an instructional model; and soliciting the reactions from the experts on the instructional design model using a questionnaire.;The consensus of the views provided by the experts yielded a model for designing food safety instruction that consists of 14 components or steps in the process of designing such programs. The components were identified as distinct events that occur in the process of designing food safety programs, with factors that effect the completion of the tasks within each component. The experts also described the tasks that occur within the components.;In response to the model, all but one of the experts agreed that it resembled the process they would recommend for designing food safety instructional programs. All of the experts agreed that all of the components in the model are necessary and nearly all of them indicated that the components or steps the design process occur in an order or sequence of events. Nearly all of the experts indicated that all of the components need to be completed to result in a program that teaches adults about food safety so that they adopt safe food handling behaviors.