Development of the Trying New Foods Scale: A preschooler self-assessment of willingness to try new foods
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.
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2022, AppetiteCitation 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).
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