"How do you remember you ate...?": a Delphi technique study to identify retrieval categories from fourth-grade...

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Nutrition
• Cognitive Psychology
• Dietary Assessment

Background:

• Accurate dietary reporting is crucial for understanding children's nutritional intake.
• Children's memory recall for food consumption can be influenced by various retrieval strategies.
• Existing methods for assessing children's dietary intake may not fully capture their memory retrieval processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish a consensus on retrieval categories children use to remember food intake.
• To validate these categories by assessing their relationship with accurate reporting of school lunch consumption.
• To identify specific retrieval cues that enhance the accuracy of children's dietary self-reports.

Main Methods:

• A Delphi technique involving 10 psychologists was employed.
• Interviews with 89 fourth graders about their school lunch intake were analyzed.
• Retrieval categories were developed using cluster analysis and validated against observed food consumption.

Main Results:

• Sixteen consensus retrieval categories were identified, with 6 used most frequently.
• Students utilized a diverse range of categories for reporting food intake.
• Accurate reporting was associated with the use of "taste/smell/texture" and "visual" retrieval categories, rather than "order items consumed" or "oral cue still present."

Conclusions:

• The developed categories offer insights into children's memory retrieval for food.
• These findings can guide the design of interventions to improve children's dietary self-reporting accuracy.
• Sensory and visual cues appear to be more effective retrieval strategies for accurate dietary recall in children.