Virginia Tech
Project Title: Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes: an experimental marketplace approach to study individual-level beverage purchasing and beverage tax design
Haylee Downey is a PhD candidate in the Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health graduate program at Virginia Tech. She is a graduate research assistant in Dr. Jeff Stein’s lab at the Center for Health Behaviors Research. During her undergraduate degree at Utah State University, she studied delay discounting under the mentorship of Dr. Amy Odum. Her research interests involve using behavioral science to better understand public health nutrition policies and interventions.
The SABA grant will support Haylee’s dissertation work on sugar-sweetened beverage taxes. The food environment, or types, prices, and accessibility of foods, is a primary driver of diet-related chronic disease. Policy changes that target the food environment are essential to improve public health. Sugar-sweetened beverages, like soda, contribute to poor diet quality and are one of the many highly palatable and heavily marketed food products in the food environment. Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages are an effective policy to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage purchasing, but the optimal design of beverage taxes and the impact of beverage taxes at the individual level is unclear.
Inspired by work on the Experimental Tobacco Marketplace conducted at Virginia Tech, Haylee developed the Experimental Beverage Marketplace, an online laboratory store environment with beverages typically available at grocery stores where the prices and display of products are under control of the experimenter. In the current study, Haylee will use the Experimental Beverage Marketplace to 1) experimentally test the effectiveness of different beverage tax designs at reducing sugar-sweetened beverage purchasing and 2) to characterize how beverage taxes impact health equity by studying people with lower socioeconomic status and people who heavily drink sugar-sweetened beverages. In a between-within design, 495 adults who drink sugar-sweetened beverages will complete shopping trips under a control condition where prices are normal and under one of two tax conditions. One tax condition mimics the broader Philadelphia beverage tax, where both sugar-sweetened beverages and beverages with non-sugar sweetener (e.g., diet soda) are taxed. The other tax condition mimics most other targeted beverage taxes in the United States, where only sugar-sweetened beverages are taxed. Results may help inform beverage tax design and the health equity implications of beverage taxes.
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