The reliability and validity of a short FFQ among Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous rural children.
OBJECTIVE
To determine the reproducibility and validity of a short FFQ (SFFQ) for Australian rural children aged 10 to 12 years, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.


METHODS
In this cross-sectional study participants completed the SFFQ on two occasions and three 24 h recalls. Concurrent validity was established by comparing results of the first SFFQ against food recalls; reproducibility was established by comparing the two SFFQ.


METHODS
The north coast of New South Wales in the Australian summer of late 2005.


METHODS
Two hundred and forty-one children (ninety-two Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and 100 boys) completed two SFFQ and were included in the reproducibility study; of these, 205 participants with a mean age of 10·8 (sd 0·7) years took part in the validity study.


RESULTS
The SFFQ showed moderate to good reproducibility among all children with kappa coefficients for repeated measures between 0·41 and 0·80. Eighteen of twenty-three questions demonstrated good validity against the mean of the 24 h recalls, with statistically significant increasing trends (P ≤ 0·05) for mean daily weight and/or frequency as survey response categories increased. A similar number of short questions showed good validity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children as for their non-Indigenous counterparts.


CONCLUSIONS
Many short questions in this SFFQ are able to discriminate between different categories of food intake and provide information on relative intake within the given population. They can be used to monitor and/or evaluate population-wide health programmes, including those with rural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
Gwynn
Josephine D
JD
Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Health, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia. Josephine.Gwynn@newcastle.edu.au
Flood
Victoria M
VM
D'Este
Catherine A
CA
Attia
John R
JR
Turner
Nicole
N
Cochrane
Janine
J
Wiggers
John H
JH
D001315:Australia; D002648:Child; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004034:Diet Surveys / Q000379:methods*; D005006:Ethnicity; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005260:Female; D005518:Food Preferences; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009517:New South Wales; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012424:Rural Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires