Int J Behav Nutr Phy
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Int J Behav Nutr Phy · Nov 2012
Evidence for validity of five secondary data sources for enumerating retail food outlets in seven American Indian communities in North Carolina.
Most studies on the local food environment have used secondary sources to describe the food environment, such as government food registries or commercial listings (e.g., Reference USA). Most of the studies exploring evidence for validity of secondary retail food data have used on-site verification and have not conducted analysis by data source (e.g., sensitivity of Reference USA) or by food outlet type (e.g., sensitivity of Reference USA for convenience stores). Few studies have explored the food environment in American Indian communities. To advance the science on measuring the food environment, we conducted direct, on-site observations of a wide range of food outlets in multiple American Indian communities, without a list guiding the field observations, and then compared our findings to several types of secondary data. ⋯ Secondary data sources both over- and under-represented the food environment; they were particularly problematic for identifying convenience stores and specialty markets. More attention is needed to improve the validity of existing data sources, especially for rural local food environments.