Assessing Commensality in Research

Abstract

This scoping review focuses on the assessment of commensality in research and attempts to identify used methods for performing research on commensality. It reflects a multidisciplinary research field and draws on findings from Web of Science Core Collection, up to April 2019. The empirical material consisted of 61 studies, whereof most were qualitative research, and some were of quantitative character, including very few dietary surveys. The findings show nine papers categorized as using quantitative approaches, 52 papers were categorized as qualitative. The results show a wide variety of different ways to try to find and understand how commensality can be understood and identified. There seems to be a shift in the very concept of commensality as well as some variations around the concept. This paper argues the need to further investigate the importance of commensality for health and wellbeing, as well as the need to gather data on health and health-related behaviors, living conditions and sociodemographic data in parallel. The review shows the broad-ranging areas where commensality is researched, from cultural and historical areas to ethnographic or anthropological areas over to dietary assessment. To complement large dietary surveys with methods of assessing who you are eating with in what environment should be a simple way to further our knowledge on the circumstances of meal intake and the importance of commensality. To add 24-h dietary recall to any study of commensality is another way of identifying the importance of commensality for dietary quality. The use of mixed methods research was encouraged by several authors as a good way forward in the assessment of commensality and its importance.

What Is Commensality? A Critical Discussion of an Expanding Research Field

“…The public health potential of commensality thus remains an open question, calling for further empirical studies from a variety of angles, disciplines, and geographical and cultural contexts. Moreover, we agree with Scander et al [ 96 , 97 ] that learning more about commensality’s role in food and health requires reliable ways of assessing eating together, for example, as part of studies on dietary intake and meal timing.…”

Assessing Time of Eating in Commensality Research

“…In connection to performing an earlier scoping review on commensality [27], "time of eating" seemed to be a neglected topic, which is why an expanded search was performed on this topic. Scoping reviews are useful tools in the ever-increasing arsenal of evidence synthesis approaches, and one can conduct scoping reviews instead of systematic reviews where the purpose of the review is to identify knowledge gaps, scope a body of literature, clarify concepts or investigate research conduct (Munn et al, 2018).…”

Solo Dining at Home in the Company of ICT Devices

“…Different research disciplines have explored the concept and components of commensality using a range of methods to capture its core. It seems, though, that the term is used inconsistently and includes different conceptual constructs such as "family dinner" and "eating together" (Jönsson et al, 2021;Scander et al, 2021). The origin of the term insinuates notions of sharing a table.…”