Are you working on an upcoming grant proposal? Consider using NCCOR’s Measures Registry to strengthen your proposal. The Measures Registry is a searchable database of diet and physical activity measures relevant to childhood obesity research. Its purpose is to standardize the use of common measures and research methods across childhood obesity research at the individual, community, and population levels. The Measures Registry also has filters that can help you reach your intended population your population and highlights the psychometric properties of each measure including reliability and validity.
So, how do you incorporate this into your proposal? Let’s walk through an example!
In this scenario, you are writing a proposal for a school-based obesity prevention intervention attempting to change à la carte offerings in high school cafeterias. You have decided that the primary outcome of the study is foods sold in the cafeteria using sales data from cash register receipts.
For your primary outcome, you know that you want to get sales data that can detail the food items purchased on a daily basis, but you also know that you should assess foods and beverages available in the schools before and after the intervention period as process data. However, you might be less familiar with measures of the food environment that exist related to this outcome.
In the Measures Registry, you can filter for measures of the food environment, children ages 12–18, and search for measures related to schools. Once you make those adjustments, you have 65 potential articles at your disposal. As you scan the titles, you see an inventory or checklist for “Middle School and High School A La Carte Food Environments” and a school food checklist that might be good options.
As you can see, the Registry provides easy-to-access information on how to use the measures, as well as the training and time required to implement them. It will save you time when you are working on your next proposal by allowing you to review a list of measures, including the validity and reliability properties of each.
Additionally, if you want a primer on any of the four domains of the Measures Registry, you can check out the Measures Registry User Guides, which are designed to complement the Measures Registry and provide an overview of measurement, describe general principles of measure selection, and highlight additional resources. The User Guides present case studies that walk researchers through the process of using the Measures Registry to select appropriate measures—perfect for guiding your proposal writing process.