Resources

This Intake survey guidance document provides an overview of key planning and design considerations for quantitative 24-hour recall dietary surveys in low- and middle-income countries. Among the topics addressed in the guidance document are: Survey design options and implications for sample size; Methodological choices that affect cost and logistics (including guidance on the minimum number of repeat 24-hour recalls that are required to estimate usual intake); Pre-survey inputs unique to dietary surveys; Pre-survey fieldwork, training and piloting; timing of the survey; and Rough estimates of dietary survey costs, and options and trade-offs for minimizing them. The sample size guidance provided for dietary surveys is based on simulation work carried out to estimate the precision with which dietary statistics can be estimated for a range of sample sizes (refer to Appendix 2A and 2B for the results of this work).