Objectives: To investigate the internal consistency of the scales and the test -retest reliability and predictive validity of behaviour theory-based constructs measuring personal, social and environmental correlates of fruit and vegetable intake in 10 -11-year-old children. Design: Test-retest with one-week interval. Setting: Five European countries: Norway, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium. Subjects: Three hundred and twenty-six children completed the questionnaire during class hours. Results: For the total sample across all countries, the test -retest reliability was good to very good (intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) . 0.60) for 12 out of the 15 fruit constructs and also for 12 out of the 15 vegetable constructs. Acceptable ICCs, ranging between 0.50 and 0.59, were found for the remaining constructs. Test-retest reliability was comparable across countries. Only in Portugal were some significantly lower ICCs found for some constructs (knowledge and barriers related to fruit, general self-efficacy related to fruit and vegetables) compared with the other countries. Cronbach's a values were moderate to high (range 0.52 to 0.89) with the exception of the general self-efficacy scale, which had a value below 0.50 for both fruit (a ¼ 0.42) and vegetables (a ¼ 0.49). Spearman correlations with intake ranged between 2 0.16 and 0.54 for personal determinants and between 0.05 and 0.38 for environmental determinants. Compared with other studies, predictive validity can be considered moderate to good. Conclusions: The questionnaire provides a reliable, valid and easy-to-administer tool for assessing personal, social and environmental factors of potential influence on fruit and vegetable intake in 10-11-year-olds.

Objective: To investigate potential personal, social and physical environmental predictors of daily fruit intake and daily vegetable intake in 11-year-old boys and girls in nine European countries. Subjects: The total sample size was 13 305 (90.4% participation rate). Results: Overall, 43.2% of the children reported to eat fruit every day, 46.1% reported to eat vegetables every day. Daily fruit intake and daily vegetable intake was mainly associated with knowledge of the national recommendations, positive self-efficacy, positive liking and preference, parental modeling and demand and bringing fruit to school (odds ratio between 1.40 and 2.42, Po0.02). These factors were associated fairly consistently with daily fruit intake across all nine European countries, implying that a rather uniform intervention strategy to promote fruit can be used across Europe. For vegetables, the pattern was, however, less consistent. Differences between countries in cooking and preparing vegetables might be responsible for this larger diversity. Conclusions: This study showed that especially a combination of personal and social factors is related to daily fruit and vegetable intake in schoolchildren. This shows that a comprehensive multilevel intervention strategy based upon a series of individual and social correlates will be most promising in the promotion of daily fruit and vegetable intake in children.

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Both the 24-h recall and the frequency part gave a consistent response on separate occasions over the test-retest study period. The 6th graders were capable of recording yesterday's intake of vegetable, but overestimated the intake of fruit and juice. The ability to rank subjects based on the frequency part was rather low.

Although childhood physical fitness seems to reveal some inverse associations with obesity and blood pressure in early adulthood, these effects diminished markedly into middle age.