Reliability and validity of the Children's Dietary Questionnaire; a new tool to measure children's dietary patterns.
OBJECTIVE
To assess the reliability and validity of a new parent report measure of children's dietary patterns, allowing assessment against national guidelines.


METHODS
The 28-item Children's Dietary Questionnaire (CDQ) was developed based on Australian healthy eating guidelines and knowledge of current dietary intake of Australian children. It assesses intake patterns in either the previous week or 24 hours of foods for which intake is recommended (positive indicators - fruit, vegetables, water, reduced fat products) and foods for which intake is discouraged (negative indicators - high fat/sugar foods [non-core foods], sweetened beverages and full fat dairy products). Four food group subscales are generated: fruit and vegetable, fat from dairy, sweetened beverages and non-core foods. Test-retest reliability, internal consistency, relative validity and the ability to detect change were tested in five separate study samples of children, totalling 706 children aged 4 to 16 years.


RESULTS
The fruit and vegetable and non-core foods subscales demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha 0.76 and 0.62, respectively) and item:total correlations greater than 0.2. The fat from dairy and the sweetened beverages subscales consistently performed poorly. All subscales demonstrated satisfactory test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.51 to 0.90) and ability to detect change in the expected direction following a weight management intervention. Relative validity suggests ability to distinguish positive or negative dietary risk based on CDQ scores at the group but not individual level.


CONCLUSIONS
The CDQ shows acceptable reliability and relative validity for assessing group level child dietary patterns with key aspects of healthy eating guidelines.
Magarey
Anthea
A
Dept of Nutrition and Dietetics, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. anthea.magarey@flinders.edu.au
Golley
Rebecca
R
Spurrier
Nicola
N
Goodwin
Emma
E
Ong
Fangyi
F
D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior; D001315:Australia; D001628:Beverages; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003611:Dairy Products; D004040:Dietary Carbohydrates; D004041:Dietary Fats; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005638:Fruit; D006801:Humans; D015596:Nutrition Assessment; D018673:Nutrition Policy; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014675:Vegetables
D004040:Dietary Carbohydrates; D004041:Dietary Fats