Grains Are Similarly Categorized by 8- to 13-Year-Old Children

Abstract

This study assessed how 8-to 13-year-old children categorized and labeled grain foods and how these categories and labels were influenced by child characteristics. The main hypotheses were that children categorized foods in consistent ways and these food categories differed from the professional food categories. A set of 71 cards with pictures and names of grain foods from eight professionally denned food groups was sorted by each child into piles of similar foods. There were 149 8-to 13-year-old children (133 English-speaking, 16 Spanish-speaking) in this exploratory study. One-way analysis of variance and Robinson matrices for identification of clusters of food items were calculated. Children created a mean (± standard deviation) of 8.3±3.8 piles with 8.6±9.1 cards per pile. No substantial differences in Robinson clustering were detected across subcategories for each of the demographic characteristics. For the majority of the piles, children provided "taxonomicprofessional" (34.5%) labels, such as bread for the professional category of breads, rolls, and tortillas, or "script" (26.1%) labels, such as breakfast for the professional category of pancakes, waffles, and flapjacks. These categories may be used to facilitate food search in a computerized 24-hour dietary recall for children in this age group.Accurate measurement of children's food intake is necessary for research and practice (1). A 24-hour dietary recall is considered the preferred method of diet assessment (2) and is designed to record actual intake over a certain time period, obtaining specific foods, beverages, amounts, cooking procedures, seasonings, add-ons, locations, and times of food consumed (3). Conducting a detailed 24-hour dietary recall, however, can be cost-prohibitive for large studies and practice. A proto-type computerized 24-hour dietary recall (called the Food Intake Recording Software System or FIRSSt) for children was developed to minimize these costs, but only assessed fruit and vegetable intake (4). Research is needed to extend FIRSSt to cover all food groups.The age at which children reach a level of cognitive development at which they can accurately report dietary intake is not clear (5). Some studies have obtained reasonable 24-hour dietary recalls from 8-year-old girls (6), whereas food frequencies have elicited data similar to that Copyright © 2008 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript from adults only with children 13 years of age and older (7). Girls may be more reliable than boys (8), differences might be associated with ethnic groups (9), and underreporting has been associated with obesity (10). It is unknown how child characteristics affect the categorization or reporting of grain foods. Card sorts exploring how children categorized single food items (11), mixed dishes (12), and fruits and vegetables (13) found that child-generated categories accounted for 92% or more of the clustering variance, but the names of the categories only partially reflected a professional nutri...

Identification of new food alternatives: How do consumers categorize meat and meat substitutes?

“…The researchers identified the type of categories formed, based on the product characteristics and participants' comments about the products and the groups. The type of food categories were in accordance with the classification of food categories from Beltran et al (2008a): food characteristics (referring to the concrete characterization of the foods, like form, color, etc. ), taxonomic (referring to the common properties, like the type of food class), script (referring to the same role in a routine or event), and evaluative (referring to preferences, do not like/ do not buy).…”

“…on crossclassification by Ross and Murphy (1999), on children's development by Nguyen and Murphy (2003), and on family resemblance by Ward and Loken (1986). Categorization was also applied to identify food perceptions for improving dietary measures, education and communication (Beltran et al, 2008a(Beltran et al, , 2008b, and to study the effect of eating context (Blake, 2008;Blake et al, 2007).…”

Diverse Food Items Are Similarly Categorized by 8- to 13-year-old Children

“…Methods similar to those used in this study were applied to different groups of food items: mixed foods (19), fruit and vegetables (20), and grain foods (21). Inter study comparisons revealed Script and Taxonomic categories were also the most used in the other reports, but in the case of the Mixed dishes study, Specific Foods was the second most commonly used category (19).…”

Fruit and vegetables are similarly categorised by 8–13-year-old children

“…To minimise possible sequence and fatigue effects, the sequence of card sort tasks was randomly assigned. Card sort 1 was composed of diverse single food items (26) , card sort 2 contained mixed food items (27) , card sort 3 included only fruit, card sort 4 included only vegetables, which were analysed for this manuscript and card sort 5 contained diverse grains and cereals (28) . Children were scheduled to perform the card sort activities across two days, except for those with an early morning appointment who had time to finish all the activities in one day.…”