Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 16, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 21, 2019 - Mar 18, 2019
Date Accepted: Nov 29, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Progressive 24-hour recall. Exploring the benefits of short retention intervals for human memory in online dietary assessment surveys
ABSTRACT
Background:
Omissions and under-reporting due to limits of human memory are still among the key challenges in dietary assessment. A number of studies indicate that shortening the retention interval (i.e. time between an intake and recall) reduces the burden on memory and increases the accuracy of assessment. This paper investigates the application of short retention intervals in online dietary surveys with a view to applying this method in large scale population dietary assessment.
Objective:
We aimed to test whether reducing the retention interval increased the accuracy of a 24-hour dietary assessment system (Intake24) that typically implements the recall method, while without significant increasing subject burden.
Methods:
Automated 24-hour recall systems, such as Intake24, require respondents to remember all foods and drinks consumed the previous day. We modified the system to allow respondents to record their meals progressively throughout the day. Respondents thereby are required to retain less information for a shorter period of time. We conducted a dietary survey with 49 participants, in which we compared the results produced by these two methods and interviewed 24 participants to examine usability and acceptability of the new method.
Results:
We found that the mean number of foods reported for evening meals for progressive recalls (5.2 foods) was significantly higher (P = .001) than that for 24-hour recalls (4.3 foods). The mean energy for evening meals reported using progressive recalls (745.7 kcal) was also significantly higher (P = .02) than that for 24-hour recalls (726.4 kcal). The number of foods and the amount of energy reported for other meals remained similar across the two methods. In interviews, 63% of respondents indicated that they remembered meal contents and portion sizes better with the progressive 24-hour recall. However, 67% participants said that the original method is more convenient in terms of fitting in with their daily lifestyles.
Conclusions:
The results of our research indicate that progressive 24-hour recall may increase the accuracy of dietary assessment in online surveys.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.