The reliability and validity of recalled body shape were unknown in China. This study was conducted to examine the reliability and validity of recalled body shape as well as the responsiveness of obesity classification by recalled body shape among the Chinese rural population.
A total of 166 people from the Henan rural cohort were enrolled. The Spearman's correlation coefficient (SCC), intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and Cronbach's α were calculated to assess the reliability and validity of recalled body shape. Additionally, the receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC) was performed to assess the responsiveness.
The SCC between the twice recalled body shape ranged from 0.383 to 0.578, and the ICC ranged from 0.357 to 0.615. Besides, the Cronbach's α of the recalled body shape questionnaire was 0.845. At the age of 20–70, the SCC between recalled body shape and actual body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) ranged from 0.563 to 0.699 and 0.409 to 0.661, respectively. Furthermore, above the age of 20, the area under the curve (AUC) of classifying general obesity and abdominal obesity by recalled body shape ranged from 0.833 to 0.960 and 0.686 to 0.870, respectively.
The results indicated that recalled body shape had moderate reliability, validity, and discriminative degree for earlier obesity among the Chinese rural population.