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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Charles DiSogra, DrPH, MPH, Field Research Corporation, 222 Sutter Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94108, 415 392-5763, charlesd@field.com and Mark Hudes, PhD, Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology, University of California at Berkeley, 234 Morgan Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Risk factor surveillance telephone surveys have limits in both the interview time and interviewer skill. Collecting dietary data can challenge those limits. Diet intake questions are essential for tracking population fruit and vegetable intake to assess risks for obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The California Dietary Practices Survey (CDPS) has tracked fruit and vegetable intake since 1989 using a modified 24-hour recall to determine the average number of servings of fruit and vegetables consumed by various segments of the state's diverse population. A special two-year CDPS calibration study examining seasonality in dietary intake patterns in California also included a set of three short questions to test their usefulness in estimating the number of servings of fruit and vegetables compared to estimates arrived at using the usual longer and more detailed CDPS method. Approximately 1,850 randomly allocated respondents within the larger RDD telephone survey were asked three short form (SF3) questions about their fruit and vegetable intake before being asked the longer series of CDPS diet recall questions. Analyses compared each respondent's SF3 estimate and their corresponding estimate from the CDPS method. Results show that the SF3 correlates positively and somewhat strongly (r=0.687) with the CDPS method in measuring the number of servings of total fruit and vegetables. The SF3 overestimates the combined total of fruit and vegetables by 0.37 servings (p<.001), overestimates servings of fruit by 0.43 servings (p<.001), and is not statistically different in its estimate of servings of vegetables. Results for major race/ethnic groups are also presented.

Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to

• understand the complexities in implementing cost-efficient dietary intake questions in a telephone survey,
• recognize the utility and limits of estimating servings of fruit and vegetables using only three short questions,
• learn the statistical advantages of using this quicker estimate given the sampling precision limits of most population-based telephone surveys when tracking intake for profiling chronic disease risk factors for population groups.

Keywords: Surveillance, Data Collection

Related Web page: www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/publication.asp?pubID=152

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation