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Published on: September 18, 2018
Test-retest reliability and agreement between children's and parents' reports of a computerized food preferences tool
Carine Vereecken1, Marc Covents, Julie Parmentier
1Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO - Vlaanderen), Brussels, Belgium. carine.vereecken@ugent.be
Objective:
To investigate test-retest reliability of primary-school children's reports of food preferences and to investigate agreement with parental reports.
Design:
Children completed an online test and retest, one to two weeks later, during school hours; parents completed a paper-and-pencil or an online questionnaire at home. The children's preferences questionnaire contained 148 food items, reduced to twelve scales; the parental questionnaire contained seventy-eight items reduced to nine scales.
Setting:
Children of fourteen primary schools in Belgium-Flanders.
Subjects:
In total 572 children participated; test-retest data were available for 354 children, children's tests could be matched to 362 parental reports.
Results:
Test-retest intraclass correlations were on average 0.73, ranging between 0.62 and 0.86; correlations between children's and parents' reports were on average 0.50, ranging between 0.32 and 0.62. Retest preferences were significantly higher for more than half of the scales. Children reported higher preferences than their parents for milk & milk products, fruit and soft drinks, while parents reported higher preferences for bread & breakfast cereals, meat, snacks and sauces.
Conclusions:
The results indicate that the test-retest stability was good; however, agreement between parents and children was rather low to moderate.
