I did eat my vegetables. Agreement between parent and child food intake diaries

Objective: To assess the level of agreement between children and their parents when reporting a child's food consumption. Design: Cross-sectional study in which children and parents independently completed 7 d food diaries describing the foods and drinks the child consumed at every meal and snack. The association between child and parent reporting was assessed for nineteen food groups using Kendall's tau-b non-parametric correlations, Spearman's rank correlations, kappa coefficients and Lin's concordance measure of agreement. Results were also stratified by gender of the child and his/her grade at school. Setting: Households in Ticino, Switzerland, April-June 2014. Subjects: Two hundred and ninety-nine children aged 6-12 years and one of their parents participated, with 264 providing complete data (35% completion rate). Results: Results showed a high level of agreement between child and parent reporting. Spearman correlations ranged from 0.55 (sauces) and 0 .57 (fatty meat) to 0.80 (fruit), 0.83 (starchy foods) and 0.84 (pastries). All nineteen Spearman correlations were significant at the 0.001 level. Kendall's tau-b correlations ranged from 0.44 (fat meat) to 0.81 (puff pastry). Kappa values showed low to high levels of agreement, ranging from 0.15 (sweets) to 0.77 (puff pastry). Lin's concordance correlation coefficients ranged from 0.39 (whole grains) to 0.86 (puff pastry). Conclusions: When assessing the eating behaviour of children using a 7 d food diary, children's reports might be as reliable as their parents'.