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Record W4408546612 · doi:10.1093/heapro/daaf016

Does outdoor advertising correlate with retail food purchases made by adolescents? A cross-sectional study in Canada

2025· article· en· W4408546612 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Alexander Wray, Gina Martin, Jamie A. Seabrook, Sean Doherty, Jason Gilliland

Bibliographic record

VenueHealth Promotion International · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicObesity, Physical Activity, Diet
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier UniversityAthabasca UniversityWestern University
FundersChildren’s Health FoundationCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchChildren's Health FoundationSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaChildren's Health Research Institute
KeywordsPurchasingAdvertisingConsumption (sociology)Promotion (chess)MarketingBusinessEnvironmental healthHealth promotionPsychologyPublic healthMedicinePolitical scienceSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Food marketing plays a substantial role in shaping adolescent diets, having wide-ranging ramifications for health behaviours and outcomes throughout the life course. Yet, there remains a dearth of research about how outdoor advertising as a specific channel of food marketing affects purchasing behaviours. We examine self-reported purchases made at retail food outlets by adolescents as it relates to the availability of outdoor food and beverage advertising around each participant's home, school, and along the journey to and from school. We also consider the impacts of sociodemographics and consumption attitudes on purchasing, as compared to the geographic availability of outdoor advertising. Data are drawn from a survey completed by 545 adolescents in 2018 across four secondary schools in the Middlesex-London region of Ontario, Canada. The availability of outdoor advertising in the home and school environment is marginally correlated with self-reported purchases made at fast food, table-based, grocery, and variety retail outlets. However, consumption attitudes, cultural background, and gender are significantly correlated with purchases, with substantially larger effect sizes. The overall results were consistent between estimating the availability of outdoor advertising in the immediate area surrounding the home and along the journey to and from school. There is considerable health promotion policy interest in regulating outdoor advertising around child-serving locations. However, scarce health promotion resources would be better allocated to educational programming that addresses the substantial role of consumption attitudes in affecting adolescent purchasing behaviour, as compared to the considerably weaker impact of outdoor food advertising observed in our analysis.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.117

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.005
Science and technology studies0.0030.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.326
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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