Statistics for nursing | Nursing homework help
- The food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) is a tool often used in epidemiology studies to assess food consumption. A person is asked to write down the number of servings per day typically eaten in the past year of over 100 individual food items. A food-consumption table is then used to compute nutrient intakes for key nutrients (e.g., protein, fat, calories) based on aggregating response for individual foods. The FFQ is inexpensive to administer but is considered less accurate than the diet record (DR) – the ‘gold standard’ for diet epidemiological studies. For the DR, the participant writes down the amount of each specific food eaten over the past week in a food diary and a nutritionist uses a special computer program to compute nutrient intakes from the food diaries.
To validate the FFQ, 173 nurses participating in the Nurses’ Health Study completed 4 weeks of diet recording about equally spaced over a 12-month period and an FFQ at the end of diet recording. The excel data file called VALID.xlsx contains the data for this study and is in the Data Sets in the Contents of A2L. It contains the following measures: saturated fat (grams) from the DR (sfat_dr) and FFQ (sfat_ffq), total fat (grams) from the DR (tfat_dr) and FFQ (tfat_ffq), alcohol consumption from (ounces) the DR (alco_DR) and FFQ (alco_ffq) and total calories from the DR (cal_dr) and FFQ (cal_ffq). Use this data set to answer the questions below. a) Create an appropriate graphical display to show the distribution of saturated fat data (sfat_ffq) for the FFQ. b) Create an appropriate graphical display to relate alcohol consumption measured using the dietary record (alco_dr) with alcohol consumption measured using the FFQ (alco_ffq). c) Based on your assessment of the graphical display created for question b, do you think that the FFQ is a reasonably accurate approximation of the DR for alcohol consumption? Why or why not?