Fruit and Vegetable Screener: Definition of Acceptable Dietary Data Values

Data collected on the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) Fruit and Vegetable Screener are coded as frequency and time unit – times per day, week, or month. The data contain some values that are very unlikely. We used USDA's 1994-96 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes of Individuals (CSFII) data on reported intakes over two days of 24-hour recall to make judgments about reasonable frequencies of consumption that were reported on a per day basis.

Maximum daily average frequencies (averaged for each individual across his two days of report) in the CSFII ranged from 1.5 times to 12 times per day for the relevant food groups. We accepted frequency values reported in the CHIS that were reported on a per day basis up to the maximum average values (rounded to the next whole number).

In addition, we applied judgment to determine the acceptability of frequency reports for the weekly and monthly time periods (see below). For example, a report of 25 times may be most logically associated with a month or year time period, but not so logically associated with a week time period. We applied this judgment to all foods.

Depending on the intent of the analysis, the researcher could exclude a person with a missing value for any of the 8 foods, or only with missing values on foods needed to estimate a particular Fruit and Vegetable intake variable. In our analyses of CHIS data, we excluded individuals only for the Fruit and Vegetable variables in which they had missing food-level data.