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.

Implications

The ChiPSO questionnaire is a practical tool to evaluate the importance of olfactory information in children and adolescents aged 6–17 years.

中文翻译：

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儿童嗅觉的个人意义——ChiPSO 问卷

介绍

人类的嗅觉具有不同的功能，可分为“食物”、“社会”和“环境”。关于嗅觉对成人的重要性有不同的调查问卷，但很少有人关注儿童和青少年。因此，我们旨在开发一份关于儿童个人嗅觉意义 (ChiPSO) 的问卷。

方法

问卷分两步开发。第一份问卷包括 33 个关于嗅觉信息在日常生活中重要性的陈述——涵盖三个分量表“食物”、“环境”和“社会”，对 191 名参与者（平均年龄：14.4 ± 1.7 岁）进行了管理。每个子量表的五个最合适的项目被选为最终的 15 项问卷。在第二部分，我们对 208 名儿童和青少年（平均年龄：11.5 ± 3.5 岁）进行了开发的问卷，他们还接受了嗅觉测试，以调查嗅觉功能与问卷结果之间的关系。参与者分为两个年龄组：(i) 6-11 岁（儿童），(ii) 12-17 岁（青少年）。

结果

发现年龄对 ChiPSO 总分和所有三个分量表的显着影响，青少年得分高于儿童。此外，青少年的性别对 ChiPSO 总分和分量表“社交”和“食物”有显着影响，女孩的得分高于男孩。

结论

我们报告了问卷调查结果与嗅觉表现之间的关联。此外，嗅觉信息似乎对青少年比对儿童更重要，对女孩比对男孩更重要。

启示

ChiPSO 问卷是评估嗅觉信息对 6-17 岁儿童和青少年重要性的实用工具。