PRELIMINARY EVALUATION OF THE PROCESSES OF CHANGING TO A LOW-FAT DIET

The purpose of the present paper is to identify the processes of changing dietary fat consumption using Prochaska's transtheoretical model. This model assigns individuals into a series of stages, emphasizing the cognitive, social and behavioral steps of change. At each of the stages an individual focuses on different processes, or coping strategies, to enable movement to the next stage. Dietary process items were created by a multidisciplinary team using the smoking processes as a model. These items were subjected to a Q-sort and piloted in convenience samples. The process items were distributed with staging questionnaires to 720 members of an outdoor folk music festival audience. The final group of 121 process items was subjected to exploratory factor analysis of principle components with varimax rotation. Eight independent factors emerged during this factor analysis. The processes measured by the final 60-item questionnaire relate to the stages of change in the hypothesized manner. Applications of this model to intervention settings seem possible.