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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on March 24, 2009
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 169(9):1148-1157; doi:10.1093/aje/kwp012
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2009. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

PRACTICE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY

Validity of Maternal Recall of Preschool Diet After 43 Years

Jorge E. Chavarro, Karin B. Michels, Sheherazadh Isaq, Bernard A. Rosner, Laura Sampson, Carol Willey, Paula Tocco, Walter C. Willett and William Cameron Chumlea

Correspondence to Dr. Jorge E. Chavarro, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 (e-mail: jchavarr{at}hsph.harvard.edu).

Received for publication September 19, 2008. Accepted for publication January 9, 2009.

Validation of early childhood diet recalls by surrogate responders decades later has not been possible because of a lack of diet records from the distant past. Between 1948 and 1970, parents of children participating in the Fels Longitudinal Study (Kettering, Ohio) completed a 7-day diet record for their children every year from birth to age 18 years. In 2005–2006, all surviving women (n = 59) with a child aged 3–5 years when diet records had been collected were asked to complete a 42-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) pertaining to 1 of their children's diets at age 3–5 years. One or more diet records were available for 48 children. The authors calculated Spearman correlation coefficients for correlations between food, food-group, and nutrient intakes from the diet records and the FFQ and deattenuated them to account for the effects of within-person variation in the diet records on the association. For foods, the median deattenuated correlation coefficient was 0.19 (range, –0.31 to 0.85); moderate-to-high correlations were found for some specific foods. Correlations for food groups were slightly higher (median, 0.27; range, –0.14 to 0.85). Correlations for nutrient intakes were consistently low (median, 0.06; range, –0.35 to 0.27). Overall, the FFQ did not validly reflect overall preschool diet when completed by mothers 4 decades later.

child; data collection; diet; epidemiologic methods; mental recall; mothers; questionnaires; validation studies as topic

Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; FFQ, food frequency questionnaire; ICC, intraclass correlation coefficient


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