Evaluation of Dietary Assessment Methods

The courses of Nutritional Epidemiology and Public Health are interesting for professionals who are conducting or using nutritional and/or health/disease research among various research target groups like patients, elderly or f.i. regional populations. It is also suitable for teachers in nutrition and/or health education, policy makers of (inter)national organisations or governments, managers of food or pharma industries that develop specific (medical) nutrition for target groups and the courses are furthermore open to anyone who wants to engage a career in the work field of nutritional epidemiology and public health.

Prerequisite knowledge:

To be able to pass the Master level online exam it is wise to start this course with a BSc level in a nutritional or health related education with a good background in statistics.

Assumed knowledge on Assessment of Dietary Intake and Advanced Statistics (see under Related courses in the right=hand column).

For this course you need to have basic knowledge on the statistical data analysis.

• Design an evaluation study to compare the performance of a food frequency questionnaire against one or more reference methods
• Explain the aims and principles of evaluation studies in the context of nutritional research
• Understand how errors in dietary assessment affect the interpretation of results from nutrition surveillance and nutritional epidemiology and how evaluation studies can be used to obtain estimates of potential errors
• Have basic experience in the statistical analysis of evaluation studies on dietary assessment

This online master's course addresses methodological aspects of exposure assessment in nutrition research. Focus is on design and analysis of evaluation studies which assess measurement error in dietary intakes. You will learn how to adjust study results from nutritional surveillance and etiological studies for these measurement errors.

Nutrition research is often blamed for poor exposure assessment that might impair its usefulness. For example it has often been argued that FFQs are not useful to detect weak associations between dietary intake and health outcomes, since estimates of these associations are affected by errors in the exposure assessment. Despite their measurement errors, FFQs are commonly applied in epidemiological studies, as they are considered a feasible and cost-effective dietary assessment method. Evaluation studies (e.g. reproducibility and validation studies) can help to quantify measurement errors in dietary exposure assessment, in order to adjust research outcomes (e.g. associations between intake and health/disease or nutrient recommendations) for those errors and to adapt dietary assessment methods. Therefore such evaluation studies are essential to incorporate in nutritional research such as large cohort studies, case-control studies, surveillance studies etc. Consequently it is crucial for you as researcher or practicing nutritional epidemiologist, to get training on the design, analyses and interpretation of studies which aim to valuate dietary assessment methods.

Activities

This course is an online course at master level that you follow in a cohort. Learners participate at different time points and from different time zones, as most learners also have a job. The programme therefor offers learning activities that allow you to supervised self-study at your own pace, with deadlines for assignments, and can include knowledge clips, e-learning modules, online individual and group exercises and assignments, online discussions, and in some courses occasionally live question hours through MS Teams at specific dates and times. There are no online live classes. The exam has a fixed date.

This course is quite time-intensive and requires approximately 20 hours per week for the average participant. There are assignments with deadlines.

Software used in this course:

For the statistical data analysis in this course you can use R/R Studio, SAS, SPSS, or MS Excel.

Literature

• Willett, W. (2012). Nutritional Epidemiology. Monographs in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, 3rd revised ed. ISBN 13: 9780199754038.

Upon successful completion - passing the exam -, a digital Micro-credentials certificate (EduBadge) with 3 study credits (ECTS) is issued. The EduBadge certifies the learning outcomes of short-term learning experiences, marking the quality of a course.

+Remote proctored exam with closed and open questions.

+Protocol evaluation study. Assignments are made individually.

+Peer review.

Participation in the exam is optional. If you decide not to participate in the exam, you do not qualify for a certificate and/or micro-credential.