Food Preferences Assessment: Development of a Questionnaire and Evaluation of Reliability in African American and Latino Children from Low Socio Economic Area

Background: African American and Hispanic children living in low socioeconomic index neighborhoods are more at risk of obesity-associated metabolic disease than their higher-socioeconomic index and/or white peers. Currently, there is a dearth of consistent and reliable questionnaires to evaluate food preferences in these children. Therefore, we aimed to develop food preferences assessment questionnaires for African American and Latino children living in inner-city communities. Methods: A total of 112 children, 8-11 years of age, identified by a parent as being either African-American or Latino were recruited and administered questionnaires. Internal consistency, one measure of reliability, was assessed by calculating the Cronbach’s alpha of test scores. Test-retest design was used to assess the reproducibility by calculating the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) and Pearson correlation coefficients. Results: The food preference indices for 9 food groupings exceeded the threshold for acceptability set at greater than 0.70 when calculated for the entire sample of children with valid scores for all items. Both the test-retest ICC and Pearson’s correlation coefficients were greater than 0.70 for most of the food groups and values were between 0.6 and 0.7 for others. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that the scores for preference of all the food groups included were not significantly related to the child’s ethnicity or gender when entered before or after adjusting for the other two variables. For only two food preference indices, beverages and not sweetened beverages foods, scores increased significantly with child age. Conclusion: We present an internally consistent and reproducible questionnaire to evaluate food preferences in 8-11 yr old African American and Latino children from low socio economic communities. Additional evaluations would be needed to determine if this tool is reliable for children from other ethnicities and ages.