Thursday, October 8, 2015

Will You Fill Out This Paleo Diet Survey?

This week, I received an e-mail from a graduate student at Humboldt State University named May Patiño.  She asked me to share her online research survey targeted to Paleo dieters.  Here are the goals of her research, in her words:
The main objective of my study is exploring how the Paleo diet is being implemented in practice.  I would like to assess the health outcomes of these practices, as well evaluate how closely they conform to, or deviate from ways this diet is being described in theoretical literature, and implemented in controlled diet trials. I also want to be able to use the data collected to help explain what is driving the popularity of the ancestral health movement. Ultimately, I would like this information to be used to better inform protocols for controlled diet trails.
The survey took me about 40 minutes to complete.  You're welcome to participate whether or not you're on the Paleo diet.  Please consider taking the survey, for the love of science!

Research Survey: The Paleo Diet in the US

6 comments:

Evinx said...

Started the survey but w/o a definition of the "paleo diet" - it is difficult to respond accurately. There are numerous definitions of the paleo diet. Seems like someone not familiar with "paleo" did not do really test this survey. Therefore, stopped at question 12. I think they would have been better off not asking this question + just define people who are paleo by their answers as to what they are and are not eating.

Astrid said...

I have to agree with Evinx. With surveys like this, I no longer wonder why study outcomes/conclusions often seem to be quite dubious

Stephan Guyenet said...

Hi Evinx and Astrid,

I disagree. The point is to understand what people mean by "Paleo diet". If you self-identify as Paleo on the survey, they can then look at your dietary habits and see what Paleo means to you. One of the key goals of the survey is to understand how people are implementing the Paleo diet, and that's not possible if they start with their own definition.

Pauline said...

I did my best but I can see why these questionnaires are full of errors. I doubt that aggregating them will provide better accuracy .

Unknown said...

I would have liked more discrimination in the time frames. I can't exactly remember now, but I think it went from daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly for some questions and something like frequently, rarely, never on other questions. On the latter type of questions, they need to stick in a "sometimes" category; the choices went from eating it a lot to eating it rarely with no "in-between." In the first type of question, they should specify better---did they want "on average?" Did they want over the last month? For those of us who eat somewhat seasonally and locally, our diet changes. I appreciate that they allowed space to make comments to clarify your answer choices. If one chooses to do the survey, as much as time will allow, one should clarify here to provide them guidance and insight.

Roland Denzel said...

Not too bad. Many of the questions needed more differentiation between levels. There can be quite a big gap between 'always' and 'rarely.' That could have used a choice of 'often' or 'sometimes.'