Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 128, 1 September 2018, Pages 21-31
Appetite

Development of the Trying New Foods Scale: A preschooler self-assessment of willingness to try new foods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2018.05.146Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Assessment of neophobia has seldom asked children, themselves, about their willingness to try foods.

  • When trying new foods, children report fear of bad taste or illness, sadness and disgust and limited positive experiences.

  • Children who reported higher self-competence to try foods rated more foods as liked and fewer foods as disliked.

  • Young children can assess their self-competence and willingness to try new foods.

Abstract

Food neophobia, or reluctance to try new foods, emerges typically in early childhood and can impact child food acceptance and dietary quality. Measures of child neophobia have largely been developed from an adult point of view and the items focusing on fear and disgust were created from observations of children's behaviors or from adult assumptions regarding the source of children's reluctance to try new foods. Using group interviews with 3-5-y-old children (n = 229) we investigated what the experience of being asked trying new foods is like for preschoolers. From their answers, we crafted a new assessment, The Trying New Foods Scale, designed to ask children about their self-competence to try new foods. Next, we measured preschoolers' responses (n = 233; 3–5 years of age; 107 boys, 126 girls) to these items and observed their willingness to taste 7 novel foods and their affective ratings of the foods as measures of criterion validity. A principal components analysis (PCA) revealed a single 9-item component for the Trying New Foods Scale (mean ± s.d. = 3.08 ± 0.70; α = 0.88). Children's Trying New Foods Scale score positively correlated with their willingness to try foods ratio (r = 0.21, p = .001). Initial findings indicate that the Trying New Foods Scale for preschoolers has good psychometric characteristics, including preliminary evidence of criterion validity. Children who perceived themselves as more willing to try foods actually performed the behavior of trying more foods and rated the foods more favorably than children who reported lower self-competence to try foods. Understanding neophobia from the perspective of the young child, and their perceptions of self-competence related to trying new foods, may facilitate our ability to evaluate young children's food acceptance patterns.

Introduction

Young children's eating behaviors can be challenging for caregivers as these behaviors must be dealt with numerous times a day and have implications for the quality of young children's dietary intake and health outcomes (Johnson, Moding, & Bellows, 2018). Food neophobia, a trait associated with unwillingness to try new foods, emerges typically in early childhood and has been extensively measured by asking caregivers to relate perceptions of their child's neophobic tendencies. The assessments of child neophobia to date have focused on aspects of fear and disgust—two fundamental constructs associated with neophobia (Rozin & Fallon, 1980). While adult ratings of child neophobia provide one point of view, understanding neophobia from the perspective of the young child, and their perceptions of self-competence related to trying new foods, may provide an additional important perspective on young children's eating behaviors and experience.

Section snippets

Food neophobia

Food neophobia is defined as the tendency to reject or be unwilling to try unfamiliar foods (Dovey, Staples, Gibson, & Halford, 2008). It is distinguished from picky eating in that, in addition to unwillingness to try new foods, the definition of pickiness includes consuming a limited type and amount of foods and rejecting foods based on certain sensory characteristics or textures (Boquin, Moskowitz, Donovan, & Lee, 2014; Taylor, Wernimont, Northstone, & Emmett, 2015). Neophobic behavior is

Assessment of neophobia

Children's neophobia is typically assessed via caregiver (most often maternal) reports of child behavioral tendencies. The most common assessment tools include the well-known Children's Food Neophobia Scale (CFNS; Damsbo-Svendsen, Frøst, & Olsen, 2017; Pliner, 1994) and the Children's Eating Behavior Questionnaire (Wardle, Guthrie, Sanderson, & Rapoport, 2001). Each instrument asks caregivers to rate their child's reactions to food, and for most items, to rate some dimension of children's

Children's self-competence

Children's self-competence refers to their own assessment of their capabilities and performance. Self-competence is not unidimensional but varies across domains of social, academic, emotional and behavioral competencies (Liberman, Woodward, Sullivan, & Kinzler, 2016). Harter and Pike (1984) developed the best-known instrument for young children's global self-assessments in these domains, The Pictorial Scale of Perceived Self-Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children (PSPCSA). The

Children's self-competence related to trying new foods

The extent to which children are likely to respond in socially desirable ways to questions about trying and liking of novel foods is under-appreciated in the literature. Birch, McPhee, Shoba, Pirok, and Steinberg (1987) reported that children's liking for pictures of foods did not reliably relate to their liking ratings when actually tasting these same foods. They concluded that “taste judgements are a more valid measure of changes in food acceptance than are visual judgments … [and] preference

Overview

The development of the Trying New Foods Scale was undertaken in three parts with separate samples of children (See Fig. 1). First, we designed a short storybook and gathered children's ideas and experiences about trying new foods via group interviews during story times in child care centers. We chose this methodology to gather data from the child perspective about the experience of being asked to try new foods. Subsequently, we used children's responses to develop items and pictures that

Participants and settings

To test and begin to validate the new scale, we recruited a new sample of preschoolers from 5 child care centers in northern Colorado (See Fig. 1, part 1.3). The centers served a variety of families of low and middle income status and included faith-based (n = 2), a privately-owned preschool (n = 1), 1 Head Start center, and 1 university Child Development Lab. The ethnicities of the families served included Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, Black, Asian and American Indian (individual level

Scale performance characteristics

Preschoolers (n = 233; 3–5 years of age; 107 boys, 126 girls) completed the self-competence scales and the food tasting assessment with the majority (95%) having completed the entire PSPCSA/Trying New Foods Scale. In all, 12 of 233 children (4 girls, 8 boys; 5%) could not complete one or more items of the Trying New Foods Scale. No one item appeared to have more missing data (see Table 3) and no difference was noted by age or sex of child (data not shown). All children participated in the food

Discussion

The Trying New Foods Scale has promise for being a reliable and valid tool to assess young children's perceived self-competence in trying new foods. It performs as a single, 9-item scale and assesses several aspects of children's experience in trying new foods. The initial psychometric characteristics indicate strong internal consistency, moderate test-retest reliability, and preliminary evidence of criterion validity. That test-retest reliability did not reach significance is likely due to the

Acknowledgement

Funding for this study was made available from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Grant #2010-85215-20648. ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01937481.

This publication was supported by NIH/NCRR Colorado CCTSI Grant Number UL1 RR025780. Its contents are the authors' sole responsibility and do not necessarily represent official NIH views.

References (55)

  • T.V.E. Kral

    14-Food neophobia and its association with diet quality and weight status in children A2-Reilly, Steve. Food Neophobia

    (2018)
  • M. Laureati et al.

    Assessing childhood food neophobia: Validation of a scale in Italian primary school children

    Food Quality and Preference

    (2015)
  • K.J. Moding et al.

    Temperamental approach/withdrawal and food neophobia in early childhood: Concurrent and longitudinal associations

    Appetite

    (2016)
  • L.J. Nelson et al.

    Behavioral and relational correlates of low self-perceived competence in young children

    Early Childhood Research Quarterly

    (2009)
  • P. Pliner

    Development of measures of food neophobia in children

    Appetite

    (1994)
  • P. Pliner et al.

    Development of a scale to measure the trait of food neophobia in humans

    Appetite

    (1992)
  • P. Pliner et al.

    Temperament and food neophobia in children and their mothers

    Appetite

    (1997)
  • B. Raudenbush et al.

    Assessing food neophobia: The role of stimulus familiarity

    Appetite

    (1999)
  • C. Reverdy et al.

    Effect of sensory education on willingness to taste novel food in children

    Appetite

    (2008)
  • N. Rigal et al.

    Links between maternal feeding practices and children's eating difficulties. Validation of French tools

    Appetite

    (2012)
  • C. Rioux et al.

    The Child Food Rejection Scale: Development and validation of a new scale to assess food neophobia and pickiness among 2-to 7-year-old French children

    Revue Européenne de Psychologie Appliquée/European Review of Applied Psychology

    (2017)
  • C. Rioux et al.

    Food rejection and the development of food categorization in young children

    Cognitive Development

    (2016)
  • P. Rozin et al.

    The psychological categorization of foods and non-foods: A preliminary taxonomy of food rejections

    Appetite

    (1980)
  • B. Rubio et al.

    Measuring willingness to try new foods: A self-report questionnaire for French-speaking children

    Appetite

    (2008)
  • C.G. Russell et al.

    A population-based study of preschoolers' food neophobia and its associations with food preferences

    Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior

    (2008)
  • C.G. Russell et al.

    Why don't they like that? And can I do anything about it? The nature and correlates of parents' attributions and self-efficacy beliefs about preschool children's food preferences

    Appetite

    (2013)
  • C.M. Taylor et al.

    Picky/fussy eating in children: Review of definitions, assessment, prevalence and dietary intakes

    Appetite

    (2015)
  • Cited by (9)

    • ‘Fussy eating’ and feeding dynamics: School children's perceptions, experiences, and strategies

      2022, Appetite
      Citation Excerpt :

      Previous studies with children have tended to focus on food preferences and food choice (such as menu design, meal planning, and level of control/input into food choice) rather than ‘fussy eating’ behaviours during a meal. For instance, it has been reported that children's food preferences are influenced by sensory and aesthetic aspects of foods, health beliefs, how fun the food is to eat, whether the food fits with their self-image, family, school, advertising, cost, curiosity, knowledge and experience with the food (Johnson, Moding, Maloney, & Bellows, 2018; Alm, Olsen, & Honkanen, 2015; Atik & Ozdamar Ertekin, 2013; Ishak, Shohaimi, & Kandiah et al., 2013; Sick, Højer, & Olsen, 2019; Waddingham, Shaw, Dam, & Bettiol, 2018). In relation to food choice and menu planning, it has been reported that food choice in the home environment often involves a compromise between parents and children and that older school-aged children and adolescents report more autonomy and value more control over food choice than younger children (Alm et al., 2015; Fitzgerald, Heary, Nixon, & Kelly, 2010; Lopez-Dicastillo, Grande, & Callery, 2013; Warren, Parry, Lynch, & Murphy, 2008).

    • Understanding Preschoolers’ Anticipation of Trying A New Food and Past Food Experiences

      2021, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior
      Citation Excerpt :

      Children's FPs are learned mainly via experiences with food.11 Both the current study and past literature demonstrate that emotions are a dominant predictor for food-related decision making in young children.23 As such, humans, including children, tend to make decisions that lead to positive emotional outcomes and avoid decisions that may lead to negative emotions.16,17

    • Research progress in food neophobia in children

      2024, Zhongguo Ertong Baojian Zazhi
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text