Roumelioti Maria, Leotsinidis Michalis
Laboratory of Public Health, Medical School, University of Patras, Patras, Greece.
Nutr J. 2009 Feb 5;8:8. doi: 10.1186/1475-2891-8-8.
The use of food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) has become increasingly important in epidemiologic studies. During the past few decades, a wide variety of nutritional studies have used the semiquantitative FFQ as a tool for assessing and evaluating dietary intake. One of the main concerns in a dietary analysis is the validity of the collected dietary data.
This paper discusses several methodological and statistical issues related to the validation of a semiquantitative FFQ. This questionnaire was used to assess the nutritional habits of schoolchildren in western Greece. For validation purposes, we selected 200 schoolchildren and contacted their respective parents. We evaluated the relative validity of 400 FFQs (200 children's FFQs and 200 parents' FFQs).
The correlations between the children's and the parents' questionnaire responses showed that the questionnaire we designed was appropriate for fulfilling the purposes of our study and in ranking subjects according to food group intake.
Our study shows that the semiquantitative FFQ provides a reasonably reliable measure of dietary intake and corroborates the relative validity of our questionnaire.
在流行病学研究中，食物频率问卷（FFQ）的使用变得越来越重要。在过去几十年里，各种各样的营养研究都使用半定量FFQ作为评估饮食摄入量的工具。饮食分析中的一个主要问题是所收集饮食数据的有效性。
本文讨论了与半定量FFQ验证相关的几个方法学和统计学问题。该问卷用于评估希腊西部学童的营养习惯。为了进行验证，我们挑选了200名学童并联系了他们各自的家长。我们评估了400份FFQ（200份儿童FFQ和200份家长FFQ）的相对有效性。
儿童与家长问卷回答之间的相关性表明，我们设计的问卷适合实现我们的研究目的，并能根据食物组摄入量对受试者进行排名。
我们的研究表明，半定量FFQ为饮食摄入量提供了相当可靠的测量方法，并证实了我们问卷的相对有效性。
