Research Brief Mother-child Agreement on the Child's Past Food Exposure

Objective: To assess mother-child agreement on the child’s past food exposure, and factors affecting response discrepancy. Methods: Twelve- to 14-year-old children and their mothers (n ¼ 78) in an urban community, a rural community, and 2 orthodontic clinics completed a 69-item food questionnaire to determine mother-child level of agreement on the child’s past consumption frequency; response discrepancies; the frequencies that the mother cooked for and ate together with her child; food types; mother-child pair effect; and food item effect. Results: Sixty-eight percent of food items had moderate to good agreement (Kqw $ 0.41). Rural pairs had lower odds of producing response discrepancy (odds ratio ¼ 0.55). Variances of the mother-child pair and food item random effects were 0.87 and 0.08, respectively. Conclusions and Implications: The child’s past food exposure recall by the mother and the child had moderate to good agreement, especially among rural mother-child pairs. Mother-child disagreement was not affected by the food items.