Purpose: To translate three novel measures of psychological mechanisms associated with dietary behavior, including the Dietary Goal-Desire Incongruence scale (DG-DI), the Motivation for Dietary Self-control scale (MDSC), the Satisfaction with Dietary Behavior scale (SWDB), to cross-culturally adapt the measures into Chinese and verify their reliability and validity in maintenance hemodialysis patients. Method: After the forward translation and the back-translation, the perspective of a panel of experts and cognitive interviews with maintenance hemodialysis patients were used to ensure cultural relevance of the three scales. Subsequently, 420 maintenance hemodialysis patients from three hemodialysis centers in Zhengzhou were recruited for the item analysis and the internal consistency, content validity, construct validity and reliability tests. Results: The moderate associations between items and domains (r>0.50) and the significant differences between the high and low groups were measured by an independent sample t test (P<0.001). The Cronbach's α coefficient of the DG-DI reached 0.884. The Cronbach's α of the MDSC was 0.831, with Cronbach's α values (0.865,0.800 and 0.797 for "Internal", "External" and "Amotivation", respectively). In addition, the Cronbach's alpha of the SWDB was 0. 914. The scale-level content validity index (S-CVI) reached 0.96, 0.98 and 1.00 for the DG-DI, the MDSC and the SWDB, respectively. The exploratory factor analysis verified the scale structures of five factors, and the cumulative variance contribution rate of the respective factor was 65.507%. The confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the original structure of the scale.
Conclusion:The DG-DI, the MDSC and the SWDB showed satisfactory psychometric characteristics. They could effectively assess the eating behavior of hemodialysis patients. Subsequent studies should recruit other different population samples in China to verify the applicability of the scale.