Intergenerational Mealtime at a Shared Site: A Small-scale Trial

NCT06996418 | Active Not Recruiting

• 1 other identifier: 30C0647400
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 42
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

The goal of this study is to find out whether having children and older people who attend an intergenerational center eating lunch together on a regular basis may be an improvement over continuing to eat lunch with their generational peers in separate dining rooms at the center. Specifically, the study analyzes the functioning and potential impact of an intergenerational dining room in terms of healthy eating, nutrition, self-evaluation of health and well-being, relational care, nutritional knowledge, and intergenerational attitudes. For this purpose, it sets up, in an intergenerational center, a dining room attended by children aged 2-3 years and older people aged 75 years and older who had previously been taking their lunch in separate dining rooms at the center. The main questions this study aims to answer are:

• Does eating lunch at the intergenerational dining room improve the intake of healthy foods by children and older people compared to eating at their usual separate dining rooms with their peers?
• Does this type of intergenerational dining room serve as a space for nutritional education of children and older people?
• Does the experience of eating together have a positive influence in terms of children's attitudes towards older people and vice versa?

Conditions

Healthy Nutrition; Intergenerational Relations; Well-being; Relational Care; Eating; Mealtimes

Keywords

Healthy Nutrition; Nutritional Knowledge; Intergenerational Mealtime; Intergenerational Shared Sites

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (5)

• Intake of healthy foods by children and older people

  Application of the Comstock method for the assessment of leftovers through photographing each dish after ingestion and calculating the proportion of waste (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, \& 100%).

  Day-by-day change in leftovers from baseline to final follow-up (18 weeks)

• Nutritional education

  Ad hoc test for assessing nutritional knowledge (identification and classification of foods, and discrimination between frequently and sporadically consumed foods) using the Nutriplato®. A set of five nutritional education activities is used to test nutritional knowledge among older adults (as toddlers' tutors) and toddlers. The number of successes and failures in each activity is assessed at different times throughout the intervention period.

  Baseline, 8 weeks, 16 weeks and 18 weeks

• Toddlers' attitudes towards older people

  A Visual Analog Scale (Young Children's Views of Older People) with original illustrations depicting images of older people according to a set of 11 bipolar pairs of adjectives (e.g., slow-fast, dull-exciting) will be presented to toddlers for them to locate their current attitudes towards older people. For each pair of adjectives ranging from -25 (extremely negative) to +25 (extremely positive) a mean global score will be calculated. Higher scores will indicate more positive attitudes towards older people.

  Baseline, 8 weeks, 16 weeks and 18 weeks

• Older people's attitudes towards toddlers

  Semantic differential with 9 pairs of bipolar adjectives with Likert-type responses (4 options). For each pair of adjectives ranging from -4 (extremely negative) to +4 (extremely positive) a mean global score will be calculated. Higher scores will indicate more positive attitudes towards toddlers.

  Baseline, 8 weeks, 16 weeks and 18 weeks

• Older people's attitudes about intergenerational exchanges

  Intergenerational Exchanges Attitude Scale , including 13 statements in two subscales ("Attributes to children" and "Relationships between older adults and children" subscales), each rated by older people along a 4-point Likert scale. This format allocates points from 4 (completely agree) to 1 (completely disagree). Higher scores indicate a more positive attitude in relation to intergenerational exchanges.

  Baseline, 8 weeks, 16 weeks and 18 weeks

Secondary Outcomes (8)

• Reaction to food items

  Daily from week 4 to week 16

• Relationship-centered environment

  4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks and 16 weeks

• Subjective well-being (older people)

  4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks and 16 weeks

• Toddlers' prosocial behavior

  Baseline, 8 weeks and 16 weeks

• Place-based eating experience (older adults)

  4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks, & 16 weeks

Study Arms (3)

Intergenerational Dining Room (Group #1)

EXPERIMENTAL

This is a group composed of 5 older people and 5 toddlers, all of them regular attendees at an intergenerational shared site.

Other: Intergenerational mealtime (intervention + follow-up)

Intergenerational Dining Room (Group #2)

EXPERIMENTAL

This is a group consisting of 5 other older people and 5 toddlers (other than those in Intervention Group #1) from the same intergenerational shared site.

Other: Intergenerational mealtime (wait + intervention)

Monogenerational Dining Room (Control Group)

NO INTERVENTION

This group is made up of 11 elderly people and 12 children from the same intergenerational shared site as the two intervention groups.

Interventions

Intergenerational mealtime (intervention + follow-up) OTHER

Intergenerational lunchtime at an intentional intergenerational dining room 4 days a week for 8 weeks. Once this period is over, this group will move on to a follow-up phase that will last for another 8 weeks, during which they will eat 5 days a week in different dining rooms with their generational peers, as they had been doing up to the time of the intervention. Finally, they will undergo a last follow-up period of about 2 weeks.

Intergenerational Dining Room (Group #1)

Intergenerational mealtime (wait + intervention) OTHER

Waiting period consisting of 8 weeks (while Intervention Group #1 is using the intergenerational dining room). During this period toddlers and older people will eat lunch 5 days a week with their generational peers in separate dining rooms as they have been doing before the intervention. They will then move to eating together lunch 4 days a week for 8 weeks in the intergenerational dining room. Once this period is over they will enter a final follow-up phase for about 2 weeks during which they will go back to eat in generationally separate dining rooms.

Intergenerational Dining Room (Group #2)

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 2 Years+
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: No
• Age Groups: Child (0-17), Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• Informed consent signed by each participant or his/her legal representative.
• Eating autonomy: Ability to feed oneself without continuous assistance from another person.
• Expected stay at the Intergenerational Center until July 2025.
• Negative certificate of Sexual Offenses (mandatory in case of contact with minors).
• Adequate cognitive status: mild or moderate cognitive impairment (rating ≤5 on the Global Deterioration Scale - GDS).
• Informed consent: Signature of the legal guardian authorizing participation in the study.
• Child's assent: Positive expression of willingness to participate.
• Feeding autonomy: Ability to eat without continuous assistance from an adult.
• Expected permanence in the Intergenerational Center until July 2025.

You may not qualify if:

• Advanced cognitive impairment (GDS \> 5) affecting comprehension and social interaction.
• Severe dysphagia or oral health problems preventing normal feeding.
• Unstable medical conditions that limit intergenerational dining attendance.
• History of aggressive behavior or history of refusal to interact with children.
• Lack of consent or refusal to participate in any of the study assessments.
• Need for ongoing feeding assistance.
• Severe medical conditions affecting feeding or social participation (e.g. severe metabolic disease).
• Expectation of transfer or departure from the Intergenerational Center prior to completion of the study.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Universidad de Granada: lead
• Nestlé Nutrition Spain: collaborator
• Macrosad: collaborator

Study Sites (1)

Centro Intergeneracional de Referencia de Macrosad

Albolote, Granada, 18220, Spain

Location

Related Links

• Public presentation of the pilot's launching (Spanish)

MeSH Terms

Interventions

Methods

Intervention Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Investigative Techniques

Study Officials

• Mariano Sánchez, Doc.Soc.

  Universidad de Granada

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: TREATMENT
• Intervention Model: CROSSOVER
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Head, Macrosad Chair in Intergenerational Studies

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: May 9, 2025
• First Posted: May 30, 2025
• Study Start: February 18, 2025
• Primary Completion: July 7, 2025
• Study Completion: July 21, 2025
• Last Updated: May 31, 2025

Record last verified: 2025-05

Locations

ES (1)