title: The youth/adolescent questionnaire has low validity and modest reliability among low-income African-American and Hispanic seventh- and eighth-grade youth.
abstract: The Youth/Adolescent Questionnaire is a food frequency questionnaire developed for youth aged 9 to 19 years that attempts to assess diet during the past 12 months. It was developed and previously validated with white youth; however, a validation study with fourth- to seventh-grade African-American youth revealed lower validation coefficients. This study validated the Youth/Adolescent Questionnaire with 89 low-income seventh- and eighth-grade Hispanic and African-American youth. The youth completed the Youth/Adolescent Questionnaire on two occasions 3 weeks apart, and completed up to six food records in between. Most of the reliability coefficients were adequate, except for percent of energy from fat and high-fat vegetables for Hispanic students. Validity coefficients were low, even after correcting for error. The ability of seventh- and eighth-grade low-income African-American and Hispanic youth to report usual intake over a period of time appears to be limited and may not provide a valid measure of consumption.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, 100 Bates, Houston, TX 77030, USA. kcullen@bcm.tmc.edu
authors.forename: Karen Weber
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Cullen
authors.forename: Issa
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Zakeri
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D017195:Adolescent Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D044383:Black People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015930:Diet Records; D004041:Dietary Fats / Q000008:administration & dosage; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005260:Female; D005638:Fruit; D006630:Hispanic or Latino / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015596:Nutrition Assessment; D011203:Poverty; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D014675:Vegetables; D001741:Black or African American
chemical_list: D004041:Dietary Fats