Short Pictorial Sweetened Beverage Scale Demonstrates Convergent Validity with Diet Logs

Abstract

Many nutrition education programs target soda in an effort to improve behaviors shown to be related to diet quality and weight status. Using visually enhanced behavioral items designed for low literate participants of USDA food assistance and education programs, our objective is to provide evidence of convergent validity with dietary recall logs. Low‐income parents (n=144) provided self‐administered Healthy Kids (HK) and three child 24‐hour diet recalls. A sweetened beverage variable was the sum of the ounces of soda, sports drinks, fruit drinks, and sweetened milks. Test‐retest reliability was measured (r=.65, p<.0001). Soda ‘times a week' (p=0.001) and sports drink 'times a day' (p=0.04) questions performed better than the soda ‘times a day' (p=.08). The 3‐item scale [recoded to the healthy direction] was negatively related to a sum of the volume of sweetened beverages on the food logs [r=0.31, p<0.01]. This pictorial assessment may be useful in assessing the child's sweetened beverage behaviors.Supported by National Research Initiative #2009‐55215‐05019 & Agriculture and food Research Initiative #2010‐85215‐20658 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Human Nutrition and Obesity 93330.