FIA-Q (Foodwork)

Household Foodwork Interactional Assessment Questionnaire (FIA-Q) 

What is the FIA-Q? 

The Household Foodwork Interactional Assessment Questionnaire (FIA-Q) is the first tool for measuring household foodwork. When it has been piloted and robustly evaluated, we will translate it into multiple languages and make it free for use in both online and paper form. The main FIA-Q version is the FIAQ-10, which is only 10 questions and is quick to complete (less than 10 minutes). It can be filled out by people who are interested in nutrition, by participants in research studies, or by patients who are given dietary recommendations by clinicians. 

The FIA-Q10 measures time use for four parts of foodwork for individuals and their households: (1) planning, (2) getting, (3) preparing/cooking, and (4) cleaning up food. The FIA-Q10 also identifies frequency of eating at home, special diets, household composition, as well as stress, barriers, and desired supports related to household foodwork.

In the FIA-Q, people are asked about their foodwork they did in the last week to prevent difficulty remembering and to reflect the week that actually happened rather than a ‘typical’ week.

What is Household Foodwork? 

Household foodwork is defined as “the physical and mental tasks for eating”. This includes the physical acts of foodwork (such as shopping, chopping, cooking, and cleaning) and the mental labour (such as budgeting, monitoring how much food is at home and what is needed, and remembering food allergies and special diets). 

Although household foodwork may be connected to important concepts like food security and food literacy, household foodwork is a distinct entity (the tasks for eating) not captured in the measurement of any other concept.

Why do people want to measure foodwork? 

Healthcare professionals such as dietitians and doctors want to know if their patients are able to feasibly do the foodwork needed for their recommended diet, and if not, what barriers are they facing?  

Researchers want to increase design efficiency of nutrition studies and explain some of the large variation in the relationship between dietary recommendations (such as Canada’s Food Guide which recommends planning meals and cooking more often at home) and peoples’ actual food intake.   

The foodwork time use estimates can be used for many things such calculating the indirect costs of foodwork endured (i.e. if a medical diet require it) or saved (i.e. if a school lunch program provides food and saves household’s foodwork) for tax purposes and to examine cost effectiveness. They can also be used to study potential relationships between amount of foodwork done and health outcomes.

Evidence shows that inequities and challenges in household foodwork can thwart healthy eating. Despite the near-universal reality of eating food at home, it remains unknown how much time people spend on household foodwork. It is also not known how social-structural position factors (such as age, (dis)ability, and employment status) influence who does household foodwork.  

With chronic disease rates on the rise and nutrition being a top modifiable risk factor for disease, understanding how the practical factors and inequities of foodwork can avert people from healthy eating helps tackle a health management issue that is relevant to anyone who eats at home. 

What is the FIA-Q Optional Demographics Section? 

It is a free additional section of 17 questions that can be used to collect self-identified demographic data using the current best practices (e.g., Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) so that the foodwork data can be analyzed in context and we can study how social position factors (such as gender, (dis)ability, employment status, age, and region) interact to affect household foodwork.  

There are many factors that may be connected to doing or not doing household foodwork, such as age, gender identity, geographic location, and other social-structural positions. Collecting data on these social-structural positions will allow for doing the types of analysis that are considered best practice in health research: investigation into confounding, stratification, mediation, and interaction to understand differences in health outcomes and prevalence, and to identify inequities among social-structural groups. It also allows for the application of analysis frameworks such as the intersectionality analysis framework, which considers how multiple social-structural positions (such as gender and race) jointly influence power (discrimination or privilege) and is widely used in studies to increase the accuracy of research findings and better examine injustice and inequity in medicine and public health. 

The FIA-Q optional demographics section contains written explanation of why we are collecting these potentially sensitive data, and allows for explanation of privacy and confidentiality of the data for reassurance. 

Who funded and is involved in this work? 

This work has been funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) which is the Government of Canada's agency responsible for funding health research in Canada. We are collaborating with people around the world to develop and pilot the FIA-Q. If you would like to be involved, please email leah.cahill@dal.ca