Developing and validating a scale to measure Food and Nutrition Literacy (FNLIT) in elementary school children in Iran

Abstract

Background

Validity and Internal Consistency of the Preschool-FLAT, a New Tool for the Assessment of Food Literacy in Young Children from the Training-To-Health Project

“…However, when taking into consideration these two dimensions, the SEM demonstrated that they were poorly explained by those items. This is in contrast with what found in one scale developed for children from elementary schools which measured the cognitive domain (understanding and knowledge) and the skill domain (functional, food choice, interactive, and critical skills) with 6 subscales and confirmed the validity of this structure [23]. Instead, in our study, a 4-factor model was fairly consistent with our data, this being confirmed by acceptable values of absolute fit indices (relative χ 2 , RMSEA, and SRMR) and incremental and parsimony fit indices (CFI, AIC, and BIC); even though an initial 5-factor model of the FL scale was proposed, confirmatory analysis showed that four domains encompassing weight/food/health, food/environment, traditional foods, and food groups/meals were explained by the selected items ( Figure 1).…”

“…It is intuitive that children in preschool age have not still developed the basic skills such as reading and writing, and at higher extent they cannot even be able to use health information to gain greater control over life events and situations. This implies that the authors of the present investigation have not applied this construct to the developed scale, in contrast with other studies addressed to scholars or adult/older people that were based on this hierarchical construct to measure validity of the scale for the assessment of FL [23,49,50]. The developed instrument, therefore, does not actually capture all aspects potentially relevant for the multifaceted concept of FL, but the authors believe that the chosen and analyzed items can cover all the possible knowledge and skills that can be reachable in the age range 3-6 years.…”

“…To the authors' knowledge, no instrument in the literature has been developed so far to assess FL in such young children. Some authors developed FL questionnaires addressed to children in elementary schools and encouraged to perform these kinds of surveys in different age groups of children [22,23]; some others conceived an instrument for pre-schoolers, that anyway was aimed at assessing only knowledge of foods and their relative healthiness [44]. Thus, the development of a scale assessing pre-schoolers' FL was required to guide the development and ensure effectiveness of nutrition related interventions [45].…”

“…The importance of assessing FL since preschool age has been highlighted and, to this purpose, reliable and valid measures are needed. Existing FL measurement tools tend to emphasize literacy and numeracy skills and/or nutrition knowledge [12]; some of them employ only nutrition knowledge-based outcomes [17,18]; or they are targeted to adults or scholar children [19][20][21][22][23]. Hence, it is urgent to develop a tool that is targeted to pre-schoolers, that is accurate and reliable and assesses not only knowledge but also skills related to food and nutrition.…”

School-based interventions for promoting food and nutrition literacy (FNLIT) in elementary school children: a systematic review protocol

“…As a result, specific areas of health literacy, including food literacy and nutrition literacy, have been proposed and conceptualized. Studies that assessed the relationship between two concepts suggested a wide multifaceted topic that can be called food and nutrition literacy (FNLIT) [13,14].…”