Validation of a youth/adolescent food frequency questionnaire.
BACKGROUND
To address limited longitudinal nutrition data on children and adolescents, a self-administered food frequency questionnaire was designed for older children and adolescents. Initially, the Youth/Adolescent Questionnaire (YAQ) was developed and demonstrated to be reproducible. This study was conducted to evaluate its validity.


METHODS
The form was administered twice to a sample of 261 youths (ages 9 to 18) at an approximate interval of 1 year (1993-1994), and three 24-hr dietary recalls were collected during this period. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated on nutrient data.


RESULTS
Validity was first evaluated by comparing the average of the three 24-hr recalls to the average of the two YAQs. Similar mean nutrients were found by both methods. Correlation coefficients between the mean energy-adjusted nutrients computed by the two methods ranged from 0.21 for sodium to 0.58 for folate. After correction for within-person error, the average correlation coefficient was 0.54, similar to that found among adults.


CONCLUSIONS
A simple self-administered questionnaire completed by older children and adolescents can provide nutritional information about this age group.
Rockett
H R
HR
Channing Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
Breitenbach
M
M
Frazier
A L
AL
Witschi
J
J
Wolf
A M
AM
Field
A E
AE
Colditz
G A
GA
D000293:Adolescent; D017195:Adolescent Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D015982:Bias; D002648:Child; D002664:Child Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D004034:Diet Surveys; D004734:Energy Metabolism; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*