Abstract
BackgroundParents are an important influence on children’s dietary intake and eating behaviors. However, the lack of a conceptual framework and inconsistent assessment of food parenting practices limits our understanding of which food parenting practices are most influential on children. The aim of this study was to develop a food parenting practice conceptual framework using systematic approaches of literature reviews and expert input.MethodA previously completed systematic review of food parenting practice instruments and a qualitative study of parents informed the development of a food parenting practice item bank consisting of 3632 food parenting practice items. The original item bank was further reduced to 110 key food parenting concepts using binning and winnowing techniques. A panel of 32 experts in parenting and nutrition were invited to sort the food parenting practice concepts into categories that reflected their perceptions of a food parenting practice conceptual framework. Multi-dimensional scaling produced a point map of the sorted concepts and hierarchical cluster analysis identified potential solutions. Subjective modifications were used to identify two potential solutions, with additional feedback from the expert panel requested.ResultsThe experts came from 8 countries and 25 participated in the sorting and 23 provided additional feedback. A parsimonious and a comprehensive concept map were developed based on the clustering of the food parenting practice constructs. The parsimonious concept map contained 7 constructs, while the comprehensive concept map contained 17 constructs and was informed by a previously published content map for food parenting practices. Most of the experts (52%) preferred the comprehensive concept map, while 35% preferred to present both solutions.ConclusionThe comprehensive food parenting practice conceptual map will provide the basis for developing a calibrated Item Response Modeling (IRM) item bank that can be used with computerized adaptive testing. Such an item bank will allow for more consistency in measuring food parenting practices across studies to better assess the impact of food parenting practices on child outcomes and the effect of interventions that target parents as agents of change.
Highlights
Parents are an important influence on children’s dietary intake and eating behaviors
The comprehensive food parenting practice conceptual map will provide the basis for developing a calibrated Item Response Modeling (IRM) item bank that can be used with computerized adaptive testing
Such an item bank will allow for more consistency in measuring food parenting practices across studies to better assess the impact of food parenting practices on child outcomes and the effect of interventions that target parents as agents of change
Summary
Parents are an important influence on children’s dietary intake and eating behaviors. Most of this work has focused on food parenting practices, or the specific goal-directed parent actions designed to influence children’s eating behaviors or dietary intake [5] With this growing number of available instruments, there is little consensus on how to measure food parenting practices, including which instrument to use and how food parenting constructs relate to or correlate with each other. While a content map for food parenting practices has recently been proposed [11], there is no tested consensus for how specific food parenting practice concepts or corresponding items fit within each construct of the proposed framework To inform this process, this study aimed to develop a food parenting practice conceptual framework for parents with children 5–12 years old based on an existing systematically derived item bank of food parenting practices [4] using i) an online card sort task conducted by an international sample of experts of food parenting and feeding, followed by ii) a concept mapping analysis of the resulting grouping of food parenting concepts into constructs and a larger framework. The long-term goal of this project is to develop a calibrated IRM item bank that can be used with computerized adaptive testing and can be utilized by other researchers in the food parenting field internationally
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