Venkatesh Shruthi, DeJesus Jasmine M
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jul 22;12:703373. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703373. eCollection 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many facets of developmental research, including research that measures children's eating behavior. Here, children's food intake is often measured by weighing foods that children are offered before and after in-person testing sessions. Many studies also examine children's food ratings (the extent to which they like or dislike a food), assessed picture categorization tasks or hedonic scales. This paper reviews existing research on different methods for characterizing children's eating behavior (with a focus on food intake, preferences, and concepts) and presents a feasibility study that examined whether children's eating behaviors at home (including their food intake and ratings) can be measured live video-chat sessions. The feasibility analyses revealed that an observational feeding paradigm at home yielded a majority (more than 70%) of video-chat recordings that had a sufficient view of the child and adequate sound and picture quality required for observational coding for the majority of the session's duration. Such positioning would enable behavioral coding of child food intake, parent food talk, and meal characteristics. Moreover, children were able to answer questions to stories and express their preferences researcher screen-share methods (which can assess children's self-reported food preferences and beliefs) with low rates of exclusion across studies. The article ends with a discussion on the opportunities and challenges of using online platforms to conduct studies on children's eating behaviors in their home environments during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
新冠疫情扰乱了发育研究的许多方面,包括测量儿童饮食行为的研究。在此,儿童的食物摄入量通常通过在面对面测试环节前后对提供给儿童的食物进行称重来测量。许多研究还通过图片分类任务或享乐量表来考察儿童的食物评分(即他们对食物喜欢或不喜欢的程度)。本文回顾了关于表征儿童饮食行为的不同方法的现有研究(重点关注食物摄入量、偏好和观念),并呈现了一项可行性研究,该研究考察了是否可以通过实时视频聊天会话来测量儿童在家中的饮食行为(包括他们的食物摄入量和评分)。可行性分析表明,在家中采用观察性喂养范式所获得的视频聊天记录中,大部分(超过70%)在会话的大部分时长内对儿童有足够的视野,并且具备观察性编码所需的足够的声音和画面质量。这样的定位将能够对儿童食物摄入量、家长关于食物的交谈以及用餐特征进行行为编码。此外,通过研究人员屏幕共享方法(可评估儿童自我报告的食物偏好和观念),儿童能够回答针对故事的问题并表达他们的偏好,且各研究中的排除率较低。文章最后讨论了在新冠疫情期间及之后利用在线平台在儿童家庭环境中开展儿童饮食行为研究的机遇和挑战。