What’s for lunch? Eliciting preferences for food on university campus
At the Centre for Economics of Obesity (University of Birmingham), we measure the economic impact of various environmental determinants on healthy behaviours. One of our central research themes is on the economics of the food system. We are interested in how food provision can influence people’s eating habits, and ultimately contribute to reducing obesity. Compared to schools and workplaces, food provision on university campuses is under-researched. In the context of the major food system transformation in Birmingham, we have partnered with the university management team to look at ways of optimising food provision on the University campus. The first step is to understand the preferences of students and staff towards food served on campus. We will do this using discrete choice experiment methodology to elicit these preferences.
While this project alone will generate insight to help transform the food system on our campus, we would like to go one step beyond and partner up with other universities to see how these preferences differ depending on the context. In this workshop, we would like to present our idea in more detail and gauge interest among EUniWell partner institutions to get involved. We are a newly-developed Centre and we hope that this will be the first step to developing collaborations with like-minded research groups across Europe.
This topic is directly related to the two topic areas: ‘Well-being and health’ and ‘Environment, urbanity and well-being’, which are also closely related to the research done by our group at the Centre for Economics of Obesity https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/centre-for-the-economics-of-obesity/index.aspx
Objectives: The intention of this workshop is to foster a new collaboration among the EUniWell partners.
Implementation: The workshop will be organised in early 2023 if sufficient interest is received. The workshop will take place online.
Proposed structure:
1. Introduction of participants
2. Introduction of the Centre for Economics of Obesity and our scope of work
3. Outline the project plan
4. Discussion
Resources: This workshop is proposed by the Centre for Economics of Obesity, University of Birmingham, and we welcome other interested groups to get in touch with Dr Irina Pokhilenko at i.pokhilenko@bham.ac.uk