Children's Personal Significance of Olfaction - the ChiPSO Questionnaire

Introduction The human sense of smell has different functions which can be categorized as food, social, and environment. Different questionnaires about the importance of olfaction in adults are available, but little attention has been paid to children and adolescents. Therefore, we aimed to develop a questionnaire about children's personal significance of olfaction (ChiPSO). Methods The questionnaire was developed in two steps. The first questionnaire included 33 statements about the importance of olfactory information in daily life - covering three subscales food, environment, and social administered to 191 participants (mean age: 14.4 +/- 1.7 years). The five best fitting items of each subscale were chosen for the final 15-item questionnaire. In the second part, we administered the developed questionnaire to 208 children and adolescents (mean age: 11.5 +/- 3.5 years) who additionally underwent olfactory testing to investigate the association between olfactory function and questionnaire results. Participants were separated in two age groups: (i) 6-11 years (children), (ii) 12-17 years (adolescents). Results A significant influence of age on the total ChiPSO score and all three subscales with adolescents scoring higher than children was found. Additionally, there was a significant influence of sex in adolescents on total ChiPSO score and subscales social and food with girls scoring higher than boys. Conclusion We report an association between questionnaires results and olfactory performance. Additionally, olfactory information seems to be more important to adolescents compared to children and girls compared to boys.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the importance of olfaction in children and adolescents and develops a questionnaire to assess their personal significance of olfaction. The results show that olfactory information is more important to adolescents compared to children, and girls score higher than boys in terms of the importance of olfaction.