Details of Recommendations & Further Considerations

The choice of a self-report dietary assessment approach for a given research objective may involve multiple dietary assessment instruments and is influenced by many factors. These factors include the type and amount of information provided by the instrument(s), analytic flexibility, investigator and respondent burden, and cost. Measurement error also is an important consideration.

The following sections elaborate on the summary table, focusing specifically on data capture recommendations and data analysis considerations and including references to specific rows within the table. These sections discuss four common dietary assessment research objectives:

Most of the research objectives relate to usual intake (i.e., long-run daily average intake) rather than acute intake (i.e., intake on a given day). In addition, the research objectives considered in this section are limited to those that require group-level estimates of dietary intake, not those that require estimates of intake for a given individual (Learn More about Distinguishing Group-level from Individual-level Dietary Assessment). Estimating usual intake at the individual level, which requires anthropometric, biochemical, and clinical measures in addition to dietary measures, has its own distinct challenges.