Using an opinion poll to build an obesity-prevention social marketing campaign for low-income asian and hispanic immigrants: report of findings

OBJECTIVE: To gain opinions from low-income, limited-English-speaking Hispanic and Asian immigrants for formative research in a social marketing campaign.

DESIGN: Nineteen questions on obesity prevention-related topics were embedded into a larger random digit-dial survey investigating the effects of language and cultural barriers on health care access. Participants were selected by ethnic encoding from consumer databases.

SETTING: California’s northern, southern, and Central Valley regions.

PARTICIPANTS: Nine hundred and five adult Hispanic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Korean Californians from households < 130% of the Federal Poverty Level interviewed in 2005.

VARIABLES MEASURED: Media usage, food stamp participation, health insurance, health problems, access and availability of fruits and vegetables (FVs) and physical activity, beliefs about overweight, and related regulation and policy change.

ANALYSIS: Descriptive statistics and percentages for all questions.

RESULTS: Latinos reported receiving most information from television; Hmong from radio. Hispanics, Koreans, and Vietnamese thought diabetes was the greatest health issue in California. Among Hmong, 83% thought FVs were too expensive, and 49% of Vietnamese thought good quality, affordable fresh FVs were too hard to find.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Identifying characteristics and opinions that distinguish these ethnic immigrant populations better enables the Network for a Healthy California to develop culturally relevant social marketing campaigns and materials.