Development and Evaluation of a Calcium-Specific Food Frequency Questionnaire (KABSA) for Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Aim: To assess the validity and reliability of 26-item calcium-specific food frequency questionnaire (KABSA) for use in healthy children (9-13 years) and adolescents (14-16 years). Assessing the amount of daily calcium intake and practical KABSA contains the most calcium providing and high calcium foods. Subjects and Method: Individuals participating in the study were selected by random sampling model. The study carried out on 183 children and adolescents in total, including 85 boys and 98 girls, in Ankara. Estimates of calcium intake KABSA were compared with those from 3 days ‘24-hour food records’ for the validity of KABSA. Testing was made by using KABSA reliability test-retest method. While the validity relationship between food consumption record with KABSA was calculated using the Pearson correlation, the reliability relationship between KABSA and KABSA-1 was calculated using intra-class correlation coefficient. Results: Average daily total dietary calcium intakes were 647.7±282.47 mg/day, 718.5±302.95mg/day and 721.1±376.08 mg/day for the food records, KABSA and KABSA-1 respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between mean intakes (p>0.05). When examining the validity relationship, there was a statistically significant positive correlation between total calcium intakes (r=0.53), milk and dairy group (r=0.67), grain group (r=0.27) and vegetables group (r=0.28) (p<0.05). It was found that the total average daily calcium intake from all groups of intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) value was 0.82 for reliability. Conclusion: KABSA may be used for large epidemiological studies, community-based research projects due to the short response time, easily be filled by school age children themselves and easy be calculated.