Assessing Commensality in Research

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.


Introduction
Researchers that find an interest in commensality research will discover that there is no easily identified common research methodology. A number of studies dealing with family meals or social eating, studied as a background for this scoping review revealed that the overlap of studies using the search term "family meal" or "eating together" with the term "commensality" was often inclusive. A recent meta-analysis of family meals and health showed that there is convincing evidence showing that family meals have an important impact on the future meal frequency and nutritional health of children [1]. The definitions of "family meals" has, however, been shown to be inconsistent and concentrating on number of family meals per week [2]. Furthermore, a systematic review could identify the term "eating together" as being important for metabolic indices for nutritional health [3], even though the number of studies was too small for any sensible detailed analysis to be made.
For the nutritionally interested-data on commensality are almost never gathered in connection with large dietary surveys. In dietary assessment tool portals like the Diet, Anthropometry, Physical Activity (DAPA) Measurement Toolkit from the Medical Research

Authors (Year), Country Objectives Methods, Settings and Participants Results/Discussions Results in Relation to Review
De Backer, CJS, (2013) [12] Belgium To investigate if reported childhood food habits predict the food habits of students.
Cross-sectional survey of 104 higher education students in Belgium. Convenience sample.
Students appeared to maintain recalled childhood food rituals, mainly the matrilineal dominance. Breakfast and dinner patterns especially influenced commensality.
Frequencies of recalled childhood family meals influenced the frequencies of current commensality. More so for breakfasts and dinners than for lunches.
(2017) [13] Argentina To investigate relationship between breakfast, sociodemographic outcome measures, and nutritional status among school children. 283 children 9-13 years of age, attending schools in the City of Salta, urban and peri-urban areas.
Children of lower educated parents were at higher risk of skipping breakfast, which also related to having breakfast alone.
Only breakfast habits assessed, related to nutritional status and socioeconomic status. Guillemin I, et al. (2016) [14] France To develop and validate an instrument for assessing well-being associated with food and eating in an adult population.
A preliminary validation was made with 444 subjects with balanced diet, non-balanced diet and standard diet. Factor analysis.
The final Well-BFQ was shown to be a unique, modular tool that assesses the full picture of well-being related to food and eating habits.
The questionnaire is not available in English as yet, and a bigger validation study is underway.

Holm, L et al. (2016) [15] Danmark
To analyze changes in the social organization of eating over time. Suggests employing measures that distinguish between eating venues (lowbrow vs highbrow) and kind (restaurant, café), the money spent on eating out and records of physical features of the venue that facilitate communication. Family meals were 54% more prevalent among mothers with high compared to low education. Eating no meals with family was more prevalent among those reporting that eating was one of the biggest pleasures.
The authors suggest the need for further research investigating the effects of family meals on mothers' health through nutritional and phenomenological approaches.
A common problem in most studies was that the response rates were low and in some cases clearly skewed, with non-responders of lower education level. Some suggestions that could be read out from the scoping review regarding the use of quantitative methods to assess commensality were recommending the use of mixed methods approaches, applying rigorous sampling techniques, including type of venue in the investigation (lowbrow, highbrow) and whether the venue facilitated commensality or not. Mailed or online questionnaires were used in several studies. Many authors suggested inclusion of with whom, where, how, when, questions. In all studies using questionnaires, socio-demographic characteristics were collected, in a more or less rigorous fashion and of course, ethical approval was sought, with informed consent collected from participants as soon as issues of sensitive nature were collected.
Parents described attempts to achieve family eating practices such as commensality, cooking from scratch, and encouraging a varied and nutritional "adult" diet and cosmopolitan tastes, but work and activities could compromize these

Bailey (2017) [24] Netherlands
To examine how the travel of food, food practices, and commensality reflect the flow of norms, practices, identities, and social capital between India and the Netherlands.

in-depth interviews conducted among Indian migrants living in The Netherlands
The main themes from the data included food from home, cooking practices, food sharing, and family relationships. Migrants' sense of belonging was related to the food they brought from home and the memories it generated.
Commensality with co-ethnics led to a sense of community and stronger community bonds. Commensality with other non-Indian groups was perceived to be problematic. The exchanges of food, eating practices, and care created a sense of "co-presence" in lives of migrants.  To analyze the content of a weekly nutrition column in a popular New Zealand magazine, from a social constructionist perspective.

New Zealand magazine text analyses
The articles advocated eating for health, but depicted nutritional information as open to interpretation. Fear-based messages were used by linking "unhealthy" food choices with fatness and chronic ill health.
Unhealthy foods were portrayed as more enjoyable than healthy foods, social occasions involving food were constructed as problematic.

Fossgard (2018) [29] Norway
To study how students experience and perceive their packed lunches and lunch breaks and to what extent the lunch break is a space for children's sociality and for teachers' governmentality?
Students expressed that they appreciated their own packed lunches since they could decide what to eat.
Shortage of time and disturbance in the classroom could ruin a good meal. The main issue raised was with whom they could sit and eat their packed lunches.
Findings underline the importance of considering the emotional dimensions of eating and that commensal eating is not dependent on sharing the same food. The children experienced that the lunch break was governed by an adult agenda in which they had limited opportunities to create their own spaces.

Giacoman (2016) [30] Chile
To examine the significance of communal eating among adults from Santiago, Chile.
24 group interviews were conducted in Santiago with family members, coworkers, and friends who shared meals with one another.
The results showed that the practice of commensality strengthens the cohesion among the members of a group. However, eating together also is assigned an ambiguous value On the one hand, commensality is viewed as positive in enabling connections with others. On the other hand, participating in commensality can be viewed as negative, depending on the characteristics of the commensal group and the context, something that also was revealed by this study. The table is a significant component of meals. Regarding the couch, it seems that the family chose to eat there, as a more casual and relaxed setting. Eating in bed was related to precarity, intimacy, and casualness. In the three settings, watching television was a common practice.
Commensality was seen as an important practice in different settings and contexts. The table emerged as the cornerstone of commensality. When a table was not present, new arrangements were made. Especially the couch seems to be a new commensal space, able to allow some collective conviviality. Finally, the significant role that television assumed in meals was also highlighted.
Schänzel, Lynch (2015) [35] New Zealand To understand the individual and collective experiences and meanings of family holidays over time.
Ten New Zealand families consisting of 10 fathers, 10 mothers, and 20 children interviewed in homes.
Positive and negative memories of hospitality encounters for different family members are illustrated through the emotive concepts of commensality and spatiality.
Family meals take on symbolic and publicly celebrated characteristics, whereas shared accommodation space is contested. Theoretical implications of the nature of family hospitality dimensions are further discussed. Sixty-three women living in two Swedish cities and their rural surroundings participated in qualitative interviews, home visits.
The whole procedure of preparing a meal could be seen as preparing a gift. Four phases were identified: finding out what to serve, cooking, presenting the gift in a beautiful manner, and enjoying the commensality.
Cohabiting women went on cooking with duty and joy as they had done before retirement. For widows, especially those who had recently lost their spouse, the meaning of cooking and eating was lost, and among these women there was a risk of poor nutritional intake.

Skafida (2013) [37] UK
To explore the extent to which family meal occurrence, meal patterns and perceived meal enjoyment predict the quality of children's diets.
Scottish sample of five-year-old children, face-to-face structured interviews with child and mother.
Eating the same food as parents is the aspect of family meals most strongly linked to better diets in children, highlighting the detrimental effect in the rise of "children's food." The results suggested that eating together was a far less important aspect of family meals and redirects attention away from issues of form and function towards issues of food choice. Policy implications and the importance for public health to recognize the way eating habits are defined and reproduce social and cultural capital are discussed. Mother-daughter couples in Sardinia (63) and Malta (61) Free from the commitment of commensality, some shifted away from regular meals and simplified their meal preparation strategies. This has implications for clinical and research endeavors.  Food consumption further influences conflict resolution, with strangers who are assigned to eat similar foods cooperating more in a labor negotiation, and earn more money. Consumers are more trusting of information about non-food products. Food serves as a particularly strong cue of trust compared with incidental similarity.
Food serves as a particularly strong cue of trust compared with other incidental similarity. Theoretical and practical implications of this work for improving interactions between strangers, and for marketing products were discussed. Study performed within firehouses in a large city, mix of qualitative and quantitative including group conversations and interviews and introductory questions.
The field research showed a significant positive association between commensality and work-group performance.
The findings establish a basis for research and practice that focuses on ways that businesses or workplaces can enhance team performance by leveraging the mundane, powerful activity of eating together.

Kwon (2017) [50] Korea
To assess the association between eating alone and the MetS and to identify whether sociodemographic factors modify this association.
This study included 7725 adults and used interviews.
20.8% of men and 29.2% of women ate alone ≥2 times/day. Those who ate alone 2 or more times per day showed higher frequency of living alone, having no spouse, skip meals, and less eating out. Women with eating alone ≥2 times/day had a crude OR of 1.29 for MetS compared with women not eating alone.
Eating alone ≥2 times/day was significantly associated with increased abdominal obesity. This could be shown due to a combination of commensality and weight characteristics, interviews. Focus on the changing reasons and meanings of the activity as breadth of experience in the population augments and eating main meals outside the home becomes less exceptional Ordinary events have become more prevalent, and the paper delineates two forms of "ordinary" occasions: the "impromptu" and the "regularized." It describes the consequences for understanding the social significance of eating out, its informalization and normalization. Culture theory as a set of complementary theories is seen to include and combine the approaches of different branches of science.

Paddock
By extending the borders of the conventional restaurant or the home into public space, the pop-up restaurants create spaces of negotiation between the private and the public and new forms of commensality seemed to appear according to culture theory.

Marovelli (2018) [53] Ireland
This paper focuses on a type of commensality created by bringing together diverse participants beyond kinship relations and celebratory feasting.
Case study. Urban food sharing initiatives in London-a city which exhibits an active and dynamic urban food sharing ecosystem.
Social isolation and loneliness emerge as central drivers for participating in food sharing initiatives. Collective spaces and the affective qualities that they generate are particularly vital in urban contexts in times of austerity, as these initiatives have capacity to embrace social differences and to facilitate circulation of ideas and practices.
Identifies provisional bridging mechanisms between people, communities, projects, and services, exploring the connective ways which are hard to measure through quantitative measures and, are rarely articulated. Table 6. Diverse methods: summary of the reviewed studies (n = 21).

Ares (2013) [54] Uruguay
The aim of the present work was to investigate consumers' perception of wellbeing in a food-related context using an exploratory qualitative approach. 120 Uruguayan participants using three qualitative techniques: Word association, open-ended questions, and free listing.
The expected effects of foods on wellbeing were mainly related to non-communicable diseases such as high cholesterol levels, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases.
Hedonic and emotional aspects of food consumption were important for consumers' perceived wellbeing. Development of scales for measuring consumer perceived wellbeing when eating alone or in company.

Boulos (2016) [55] Lebanon
The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the association between three components of social isolation: social network, feeling of loneliness, commensality and nutritional status.
A total of 1200 randomly selected elderly individuals aged ≥65 years and living in rural areas of Lebanon participated in the present study. Face to face interviews.
Both social isolation and loneliness were independently associated with a higher risk of malnutrition. However, no association was found between the frequency of sharing meals and the risk of malnutrition.
The present study showed that social isolation and subjective loneliness are two independent risk factors for malnutrition among older people. Tabletalk design including nine families.
Our field study shows that TableTalk does not undermine togetherness, but supports familial expectations and experiences by stimulating conversation, reminiscing, bonding, education, and socializing.
The paper discusses how technology that is sensitive to the needs of family interactions can augment the commensal experience and reflect on design choices and opportunities that contribute, rather than disrupt, family mealtimes Ferdous [57] (2017) Australia This paper presents the deployment of a mealtime technology that orchestrates the sharing of personal devices and stories during family mealtimes, explores related content from all participants' devices.
Seven families. Field study to use CHORUS. We began the initial visits at participants' home with an interview with all members of the family including children.
Family interactions through sharing contents of personal and familial significance, supports togetherness and in-depth discussion by combining resources from multiple devices, helps to broach sensitive topics into familial conversation, and encourages participation from all family members. This paper discusses the implications of this research and reflects on design choices and opportunities that can further enhance the family mealtime experience using the CHORUS mealtime technology.

Giacoman (2017) [58] Chile
The purpose of this paper is to explore the daily rhythms of eating, namely, the times at which food intake occurs during a day-long period. This study shows that people in Santiago tend to eat according to the same timetable (morning, midday and evening) and that socio-demographic variables have limited influence on the synchronization of this intake between Monday and Friday.
These results yield evidence that calls into question the applicability of the thesis of alimentary modernity within a Latin American context, which has not before been subject to investigation-time use study.

Gorman-Murray (2016) [59] Australia Canada
To examine the recent transformations in consumer landscapes and leisure spaces in inner city LGBT neighborhoods.
The study included consumer landscapes and leisure spaces in inner city LGBT neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada, investigated through case studies.
Practices and spaces of leisure-based consumption are emerging in different forms across these neighborhoods. Deploying a discourse analysis of mainstream newspaper articles supplemented by relevant LGBT press releases, focusing on the use, meaning and social significance of leisure-based consumption sites-clubs, bars, cafes, restaurants.
The balance of daytime/night-time leisure spaces, which have both social and material affordances, is a key discriminator across the neighborhoods. Daytime consumer landscapes are often framed as sociable and inclusive within the media, while night-time landscapes are perceived as divisive. Suggests that the notion of sofra embodies both a mode of being diplomatic as well as a site of everyday diplomacy The sofra enables the brotherhood to stage "events of hospitality" and mediate relationships between various "others," locally and transnationally.
There are two primary "sites" of post-cosmopolitan everyday diplomacy where shared urban civility, instantiated primarily through acts of commensality, namely the lodge and the soup kitchen.

Hopkins (2018) [62] Egypt
This paper describes the set of beliefs that underlie visit behavior and the sequence of events in visits to several of these shrines. Analysis was based on the human social relations.
The land in the Testour area in the early 1970s, historical anthropology. It is thus a form of historical anthropology.
The approach is ethnographic, with a focus on people and events rather than on texts.
The visits involve prayer, commensality, and recreation.
The shrines and the visits range from the simple to the complex. The occasional successful visit validates the system of beliefs and prepares for the next visit.
The collective aspect of the visits reinforces social relations within the groups of families and neighbors.
These rituals can be transferred in the form of shared food and drink, and justifies a lot of commensality. Fieldwork baking and investigating cakes in performance since 2009 through a series of works that invited the audience to share a memory of a significant person, place, time, or cake; in return, I baked their memories into unique cakes dedicated to those memories.
Through the signifying potential of cakes and the process of baking together, the performances evoked a multiplicity of complex emotional experiences. The baking performances echoed established symbolic uses of cake in commemorative practices including festive meals, celebrations, and religious ceremonies.
Cakes' ability to move a community through the integration of commemoration, evidenced most acutely in the willingness of participants to embrace in the creative, symbolic potential of cake. Cakes are powerful objects in performance that can intervene in a community of strangers and map new avenues of commensality.

Madden (2015) [64] US
This essay to a special issue on utopian foodways acknowledges specific details of some of these changes and intersections, explains the origin of the issue.
Workshop at the University of Kansas, overview of included essays.
Thematically, they include analyses of images of abundance and lack in the past, "real" practices in the past and present, and imagined eating in the future.
The essay concludes with a call for "speculative" futures in research, writing, and teaching about utopian food practices including commensality.

Masson (2017)
France [65] To place dietary practices into a general context in which the relationship to food tends to be individualized and in which health-related issues remain an important aspect of the discourse about food on Internet.
Content analysis on fifty French individuals (25 females, 25 males) aged between 18 and 60 years old and with varied socio-economic profiles.
Food sharing is strongly promoted and solitary refection heavily frowned upon, the sole purpose of eating not being to nourish the physical body, but also to nourish the social body and connections with others.
The method, can be used for studying commensality. Although a personalized diet restricts the objective possibilities of food sharing, it is still central in representations of food, leads to the emergence of associated practices to introduce new forms of social eating behaviors, as those spread of the Internet.

O'Connor et al. (eds) 2015 [66] UK
To "analyze commensality in all its forms" and to make the point that "not all people in the world eat around a table or a common hearth-in fact, there are insurmountable variations of all kinds." This theoretically orientated edited volume proposes to examine sociality through six "mid-level concepts": disjuncture, social field, social space, sociability, organization, and network.
"Commensality"-which at its most basic means "eating together"-suggests social relationships without defining or describing them in detail.
Unsurprisingly, there are many contesting definitions of commensality-the introduction lists them all, a long menu-leaving contributors free to choose their own interpretation, inevitably mixing levels of analysis. While food is a natural organizing theme, it does not play that role here. Sex-stratified multiple regression analyses adjusted for confounders assessed the relationship between frequency of eating with others and nutrient intake multi-ethnic cohort type 2 diabetics re social aspects of diet There was no consistently significant association between meals with others and the 5 nutrient intake measures for either men or women. The directions of association between categories of eating with others and diet quality-albeit not significant were different for men (positive) and women (mostly negative), which warrants further investigation.
Greater meal frequency at home was associated with significantly better scores on diet quality indices for men, while meal frequency outside the home was associated with poorer diet quality and energy intake for women. Better measurement of eating may inform ways to improve nutrition, especially for persons with diabetes for whom diet improvement can result in better disease outcomes.

Ray (2018) [68] USA
Aim was to paint an alternative picture of the streets taught to us by those on the move that forces us to re-imagine the national cultural space that has been allowed so far in considerations of good taste.
Streets and sidewalks are often read as mere targets of urban development schemes, rarely acknowledged for their importance to various forms of everyday life.
Western notions of public space can be seen as designed green places of relief from industrial and commercial concentration. Personal experience and a range of secondary literature an alternative way of thinking about the streets and the national cultural space is proposed, less officious, less bureaucratic, less national, than has been allowed so far in considerations of good taste.
Western notions of public space as designed green places of relief from urbanity are inadequate theoretical frames that cannot account for the sidewalk, the paan-shop, or the tea-stall, as sites of commensality, conviviality, and potential violence.  Examines an oral story that displays how embodiment is crucial for understanding language in interaction.
A shopkeeper recounts an unusual dining event, started with commensality and ended with a physical dispute. Enacting its events, and displays stance through intricate forms of embodiment, and different ways of producing and copying gestures.
Analysis shows that telling a story, beyond a matter of verbal narrative, is performed through embodied enactments to allow for achieving co-participation and alignment The data reveal a unique way of intensifying storytelling through both verbal and embodied repetition of selected story events.

Understanding Eating Events: Snacks and Meal Patterns in Great
Britain.

Conducted in Great
Britain in 2012 (n = 2784), analyzed eating occasions which respondents stated were snacks rather than meals, focusing on their frequency, scheduling, contents, duration and social context.
Snacks take place in accordance with a common and predictable schedule. Snacks are smaller and less structured than most meals but mostly do not comprise what is generically described as "snack foods." Snacks are shorter in duration, and less sociable than other eating events.
Most meals eaten in company, were planned for, and wholesome. Among these qualitative papers, two approaches were identified. The first one studying commensality to understand a phenomenon within meals, and the second to examine how to understand commensality from a meal point of view. Several papers revealed aspects of different social meanings attached to food and commensality, as well as how meaning seems to have changed over time [27,36,51]. There was also some variations around the concept, such as; commensal space, meal, eating practice, conviviality, convivial dining [18,45,68].
Moreover, the diversity of the applicability of the method differed within qualitative methods, ranging from more or less rather standardized questionnaires [14,26], with specific open questions, to collections of life stories [27,34]. We could also see the same variation in how data have been analyzed ranging from statistical analysis such as regression analysis [50] content analysis [65] or using grounded theory [35,41].
According to different application of theories, theories surrounding "practices" were observed as the most commonly used in interview studies [24,27,30,34], within ethno-graphic methodology [31] as well as in questionnaires [26]. As commensality was seen as an important practice that appears in different settings and contexts, we thereby identified a perception of the importance of commensality research for more theoretical approaches on meal and food studies.
One of the most common themes on the qualitative papers was in regards to family eating [35,37,44,48,56,57,62]. None of these papers investigated how to implement commensality in research, but still discussed how to understand commensality in the use of technology during meals, family rites, parents/mothers and, family activities and class. All papers emphasized the importance of the use of commensality in research as a notion for bringing new light to the understanding of meals. Another interesting finding in the analysis of the papers was in regards to pleasure and health aspects of eating together. Here in the qualitative part of our results, the identified commensality papers seemed to concentrate on enjoyment or pleasure of eating together. This was most obvious in Phull et al. [45], discussing that overall economic, time and social pressures may inhibit pleasurable family dining.

Disciplines Identified in This Scoping Review and Number of Papers over Time
The final papers showing up in our review turned out to be mostly from the nutrition area (28 papers); 20 of them were published in Appetite. Clinical or medical journals including pediatrics published another large part (6 papers), social science (20 papers), ethnology, anthropology (6 papers), tourism studies (1 paper), urban studies (1 paper). It seems as if the search term commensality was used in several disciplines. We did not put a limit on how old the paper in WoS could be, yet the first paper using the term commensality and fitting the inclusion criteria was identified in the year 2000. From 2000-2014, the number of papers was fairly low, only ten papers were found during this fourteen year time span. In 2015, 7 papers were found, 2016 14 papers, 2017 17 papers, 2018 10 papers and 2019 up to April 4 papers all including some type of description of assessment of commensality. Countries involved in commensality studies according to our search were mostly European, with some originating from New Zealand, Japan, Korea, African countries, USA, Canada and South America. Sometimes authors studied other cultures than their own.

Discussion
The diversity of disciplines identified in this review is broad and the methods used to describe or to assess commensality show the true multidisciplinarity of the subject. An important result is also that the term commensality as search term seems to be widely spread over disciplines over the last five years, while earlier research is scarce. A large proportion of the commensality research identified in this review was European, possibly indicating that the term commensality has been more used in the European arena.
A great deal of the identified research is focused on health and nutrition, aiming to investigate the importance of commensality for health and wellbeing [12][13][14][15][16]18,20,22,24,26,30,33,39,46,58,65,67,69]. This means that data on health and health related behaviors, living conditions and sociodemographic data, need to accompany the data on commensality. To gather valid data on dietary intake, solid dietary survey methodology should be used. 24-h recall in questionnaire format, with at least 2 24-h recalls per individual is suggested as a good way to assess dietary quality [4,12,15,16,19]. Since 24-h recall is a type of diary, it can easily be connected to questions on with whom, where, type of venue, time of day, and type of meal consumed (breakfast, lunch, dinner, other). Furthermore, several nutritionally oriented authors expressed the need for including qualitative measures to complement the traditional quantitative data gathering [15,16,19], such as open-ended questions or combining questionnaires/diaries with interviews or observations for example.
There are a couple of questionnaires that could be used for authors only interested in commensality as such [18,19], while one is under development [14]. These questionnaires seem very comprehensive and describe wellbeing related to food, with commensality as a small part. Several authors underline the importance of employing proper sampling methods and techniques to reduce non-response or at least to try to identify a sample that finally provides you with a representative proportion of the population under investigation.
It is very surprising that so few of regular dietary surveys that are undertaken actually look at commensality, venue or eating alone [13,16,17]. Considering how often a stressful working life hinders commensality at the work place or at home, it is also important to assess time and place for working meals, which we decided to address in a separate paper.
The identified qualitative studies showed that the notion of commensality to a great deal had raised interest among researchers studying meals as a central part of health or wellbeing [23][24][25][26][27][28]31,33,36,37,39,41,45,50,54,55,65,67]. Meal studies are an important part of the analysis of food and eating [74,75], as meals contribute to social life as well as impact individual behavior [8,76]. This was shown by the identification of different norms regarding how certain meals ought to be shared and eaten together, using different qualitative research approaches. We identified suggestions for longitudinal study designs for cohorts over an extended period of time, in order to provide a higher degree of understanding of, for example routinization of eating behavior in regards to commensality. Furthermore, to reach a broader understanding of commensality as such over research boundaries and an increased comparability of studies, a need was identified to find ways to agree on how to interpret research findings, and make them compatible especially between qualitative and quantitative methodology, as suggested by Malterud [9]. This by applying terms such as reflexivity and transferability applicable for both qualitative and quantitative methodology. This would also gain further possibility for inter/multidisciplinary studies, improving our understanding of commensal meals for wellbeing as well as in cultural/social studies. As in Phull et al. [45], discussing that economic, time and social pressures may inhibit pleasurable family dining, we see an importance of combining qualitative results with quantitative "dependent variables" for further investigating the relations between healthy and pleasurable eating patterns, as suggested by Scander [77], as a gap between "good taste" and "good health" were identified. This was partly observed by interdisciplinary studies between Nutrition, Sociology and Culinary Arts and Meal Science, using both quantitative and qualitative methodology.
We could not identify any particular differences in assessment methods between western and eastern studies. Differences in methodology between studies of elderly and the general population could not be established.

Strengths and Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
This scoping review used only one database (Web of Science Core Collection) and did not include other search terms than commensality. It could certainly have been made more comprehensive by using other search terms such as eating together, family meal, or other terms and using several databases. The concept of commensality seemed to have been more used over time, especially during the last five years. This could also mean that we missed some early studies performed with a different choice of words for commensal eating, such as "family meals," "eating together," or "social eating". A full systematic review should include more complete search terms and other databases [10,11]. However, it seems clear from previous systematic reviews that the definitions for these terms are often vague [2] and that the area of research is not sufficiently studied to be able to identify and disentangle relationships between eating together and metabolic indices of health [3]. We found it important to further explore aspects of timing when eating took place, why we extracted a small number of papers that concentrated on this topic and wrote a more in-depth paper on timing.
The strengths were that the high-quality database Web of Science Core Collection was used, which only includes papers published in peer-reviewed journals. The results of the search were of a magnitude that made it possible to review in a relatively rapid manner and the papers identified represented widely different disciplines. We wanted to highlight the multidisciplinary character of commensality and the included papers point at the developing field of commensality research, with commonalities and diversities in research methods. Using a quick and easy method of a scoping review provided us with a good overview of the papers using the specific term "commensality," as a part of a project collection on diet, nutrition, and health with a focus on eating together [78]. Learning from each other on how to perform high-quality research on commensality has become even more important in this era of COVID-19, when commensality is challenged.

Conclusions
We conclude that in order to gather information on the importance of commensality for health and wellbeing, we should combine valid dietary survey methodology with valid estimates of commensality. Adding simple questions on where and with whom should be easy to integrate to large-scale dietary surveys. For all studies of commensality, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods is recommended. Use of the term commensality in research papers should be encouraged, as well as providing more solid definitions of commensality and other search terms of eating together.