Measuring eating habits and physical activity in children: Synthesis of information using indexes and clusters

Abstract

Assessing healthy habits related to child overweight and obesity is important concerning the prevention efforts. A variety of measures to assess eating habits and physical activity are available, being the self-report frequency questionnaires the most common and cost-efficient. Nevertheless, those questionnaires generate a large amount of data. Considering this, the purpose of the study was to develop a proposal to synthesize information from the Child Overweight/Obesity Healthy related Habits Questionnaire (CHS-SO), through the creation of indexes and a combination of a factorial method and cluster analysis. Nine indexes were created to assess eating habits, physical activity, and digital entertainment use, allowing to classify children into healthy or unhealthy in each index. The CHS-SO was administered to 239 children between 8 and 12 years old from Cali, Colombia. Data obtained from the indexes were analyzed using a multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis. Results show that most of the children have healthy eating habits, physical activity was lower in girls and digital entertainment use was high.