Diet History Questionnaire: Proportion Formats

Alternate Version Available

You are viewing the web site for the original version of the DHQ. The latest version for the U.S. is the DHQ III; however, DHQ III does not yet have a Canadian version. The Canadian version of DHQ II is still available.

Many of the food questions on the DHQ include one or more questions to determine the specific food or foods to assign to a frequency. For example, the soda question on the DHQ is a multi-part question including, "How often were the soft drinks diet or sugar-free?" and "How often were these soft drinks caffeine-free?" For each of these questions, the respondent is asked to select one answer from a list of proportions.

Currently, the proportions used for questions that use the Proportion Format are fixed (0, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1 times the frequency). This is the way proportion responses are defined in the codebooks:

Proportion Format:
0 = Almost never or never
1 = About ¼ of the time
2 = About ½ of the time
3 = About ¾ of the time
4 = Almost always or always
Missing
Error

Future versions of Diet*Calc will allow you to modify the proportion formats. For example, you would be able to use answers such as "Almost never", "About 1/3 of the time", "About 2/3 of the time", and "Almost always". You would also be able to assign the appropriate proportion to each response. However, you will still be limited to one set of proportions throughout the questionnaire.