This book describes key methods and instruments for assessing diet-related factors physical
activity social and environmental factors physical characteristics and health-related
outcomes in children and adolescents. These tools were developed and deployed within the
framework of the pan-European IDEFICS and I.Family cohort studies. These population-based field
studies were funded within the 6th and 7th European Framework Programme respectively and were
intended to assess the prevalence and aetiology of lifestyle-related diseases in children
focusing on overweight and obesity and to develop effective strategies for primary prevention.
In the course of a decade we undertook a major research endeavour collecting standardised data
from children families neighbourhoods kindergartens pre-schools and schools in eight
European countries employing a uniform cross-cultural methodology. This resulted in a rich
picture of the daily lives and living contexts of children and their families.Studies
encompassing childhood and adolescence face the particular challenge of the transitions from
pre-school to primary school and from childhood to adolescence accordingly the instruments
used need to be adapted to different developmental stages while maintaining their comparability
across the age range. In young children questionnaires have to be completed by proxies
usually their parents while older children particularly adolescents can provide a major part
of the requested information themselves.This book presents suitable designs methods and
instruments for data collection in studies of children and adolescents. Each chapter explains
the development and background of the instruments applied in the surveys and summarises the
current state of knowledge. All chapters were written by key experts in their respective
research fields. We are grateful for their valuable contributions and their enthusiastic
support in producing thisbook which also presents survey experiences in which practice does
not always follow theory. Participants' responses can on occasion be unexpected and
unpredictable but meeting these challenges can also enrich epidemiological surveys and yield
methodological refinements. We sincerely hope that the book and the online material will be of
considerable value to other research teams.
