Scientists on the Schooling College of Hong Kong, China, have developed a 43-item Worldwide Wholesome Consuming Report Card Scale (IHERCS) to evaluate the consuming behaviors and household house meals surroundings of preschool youngsters from completely different cultural backgrounds.
The research is printed within the journal Frontiers in Diet.
Research: An evaluation instrument for the worldwide wholesome consuming report card for preschool-aged youngsters: a cross-cultural validation throughout Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the USA. Picture Credit score: Sharomka / Shutterstock
Background
The event of a regional or nationwide Report Card with a conventional grading system is important for assessing the prevalence of a selected health-related conduct inside a selected area or nation. It’s thought of an efficient and useful method to rising public consciousness concerning the significance of focused well being behaviors.
A Wholesome Consuming Report Card for preschool youngsters was lately developed in Hong Kong, adopting the conceptual framework of a well-established Bodily Exercise Report Card. This Report Card has been used efficiently to evaluate the prevalence of wholesome consuming behaviors amongst preschool youngsters in Hong Kong.
Nonetheless, widespread implementation of such region-specific Report Playing cards might face potential challenges due to dietary pointers and suggestions fluctuate throughout completely different geographical and cultural environments.
To beat this shortcoming, scientists have developed a brand new Worldwide Wholesome Consuming Report Card for preschool youngsters and its globally relevant evaluation instrument of the IHERCS primarily based on the worldwide well being authority pointers and suggestions.
Report Card growth
The research inhabitants included 2,059 parent-child dyads from Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the USA. The guardian members have been requested to finish a questionnaire comprising the IHERCS and different validated scales associated to youngsters’s mealtime behaviors and household mealtime environments.
Demographic questions have been included within the questionnaire to gather members’ private data. The IHERCS included 43 gadgets to evaluate mealtime behaviors of kids and household mealtime environments.
The well-established and widely-used Behavioral Pediatrics Feeding Evaluation Scale (BPFAS) was used for an alternate evaluation of the frequency of specific mealtime behaviors of kids. Equally, the Family Questionnaire (MOH) was used for an alternate evaluation of the frequency of kids concerned in sure structured household mealtime environments.
Vital observations
The findings indicated sturdy issue constructions of the scales of kids’s consuming behaviors and household house meals environments within the IHERCS. Inner consistency was additionally acceptable.
Relating to measurement invariance between cultural contexts, the findings indicated the institution of full configural invariance and metric invariance throughout the 4 cultural contexts. Nonetheless, full scaler invariance couldn’t be achieved. Partial scalar invariance was discovered solely within the scale of household house meals environments.
Significance
The research finds that the IHERCS is efficient for a dependable, legitimate, and complete evaluation of consuming behaviors and household house meals environments amongst youngsters from completely different cultural settings.
The examined scales’ lack of full scaler invariance could possibly be attributable to cultural variations within the interpretation and scoring of things associated to youngsters’s consuming behaviors.
The dimensions of kids’s consuming conduct within the IHERCS is comparatively shorter and simpler than different validated evaluation instruments. This may probably cut back members’ response burden and facilitate the implementation of IHERCS in large-scale research.
Because the scientists talked about, the research couldn’t set up the temporal stability of consuming behaviors and household house meals environments over time due to its cross-sectional design. Furthermore, the research couldn’t set up the scales’ predictive efficacy towards different behavioral or well being outcomes over time.
The affect of social desirability and self-serving biases on research findings couldn’t be ignored as a result of the research solely relied on parent-reported measures of kids’s consuming behaviors and household house meals environments.
Future research ought to embody impartial assessors, observational strategies, and dietician-mediated verification for extra correct responses.
Journal reference:
- Alison Wing Lam Wan. 2024. An evaluation instrument for the worldwide wholesome consuming report card for preschool-aged youngsters: a cross-cultural validation throughout Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the USA. Frontiers of Diet. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1340007, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2024.1340007/full
