Making measuring family dinner quality more meaningful: Rescaling the ‘Family Dinner Index’ for ease of assessment and interpretation

The 'Family Dinner Index' (FDI) is a tool that measures family dinner atmosphere and quality and includes parent (FDI-P) and child (FDI-C) versions. With this measure, higher-quality family dinners have been associated with reduced negative health- and risk-related outcomes among teens. This short report aimed to examine the utility of an ordinal version of the FDI to provide more meaning when using the measure. Using data from a national U.S. sample of 2,090 parent-teen dyads (10/2021-02/2022), the FDI measures were rescored and rescaled, and the associations with the same negative outcomes were tested and compared using the different versions. Both the continuous and ordinal versions had an approximate linear relationship between the FDI score and the log prevalence of each negative outcome. There were no significant differences across the estimates between the continuous and ordinal versions, demonstrating the utility of the rescored and rescaled FDI (both child and parent versions). Longitudinal research with the FDI is warranted to determine how dimensions of family dinners are associated with adolescent health and risk-related outcomes over time.•The 'Family Dinner Index' (FDI) tool can be used as a continuous or ordinal measure of the quality of family mealtime interactions.•The ordinal version of the FDI scale can provide researchers and practitioners with a more clinically relevant interpretation.