Young children's food preferences: a comparison of three modalities of food stimuli

Food preferences are widely agreed to be important determinants of eating b ehaviour in young children. Existing studies of methods of assessing prefer ences have suggested tasting and ranking foods can generate reliable respon ses with young children, but there have been few attempts to assess other m ethods which might provide a mon convenient alternative in situations where the use of rear foods could be difficult (e.g. outside the laboratory), or tasting could be undesirable (e.g, if there are large numbers of foods, or foods which children would be unwilling to taste). The present study is a comparison of the reliability of preferences measured using: (i) real foods ; (ii) food photographs; and (iii) food models, in 3 to 5-year-old children . The results showed that the tasting method produced good results, replica ting existing data from U.S. samples. Food photographs came a close second in reliability but food models produced unreliable rankings, especially in the youngest group. Five-year-olds produced significantly more consistent r esults than the younger children. These results indicate that using real fo ods as the stimuli produces the most reliable taste preferences with childr en in this young age range, but photographs may provide a convenient altern ative with adequate reliability. (C) 2000 Academic Press.