Reliability of Questionnaires to Assess the Healthy Eating and Activity Environment of a Child's Home and School

Nadia Mastersson,Annabelle Wilson,Anthea Magarey

doi:10.1155/2013/720368

Abstract

Childhood overweight and obesity are a growing concern globally, and environments, including the home and school, can contribute to this epidemic. This paper assesses the reliability of two questionnaires (parent and teacher) used in the evaluation of a community-based childhood obesity prevention intervention, the eat well be active (ewba) Community Programs. Parents and teachers were recruited from two primary schools and they completed the same questionnaire twice in 2008 and 2009. Data from both questionnaires were classified into outcomes relevant to healthy eating and activity, and target outcomes, based on the goals of the ewba Community Programs, were identified. Fourteen and 12 outcomes were developed from the parent and teacher questionnaires, respectively. Sixty parents and 28 teachers participated in the reliability study. Intraclass correlation coefficients for outcomes ranged from 0.37 to 0.92 (parent) (P < 0.05) and from 0.42 to 0.86 (teacher) (P < 0.05). Internal consistency, measured by Cronbach's alpha, of teacher scores ranged from 0.11 to 0.91 and 0.13 to 0.78 for scores from the parent questionnaire. The parent and teacher questionnaires are moderately reliable tools for simultaneously assessing child intakes, environments, attitudes, and knowledge associated with healthy eating and physical activity in the home and school and may be useful for evaluation of similar programs.

Highlights

Overweight and obesity are a global concern in both developed and developing countries and in school age children, the prevalence continues to remain high
The aim of this paper is to report the reliability of the parent and teacher questionnaires, tools that assess the diet and physical activity environments of children in the home and school, respectively
Parents who participated in this ewba evaluation follow-up (Sept–Nov 2009) were invited by letter to complete the questionnaire on a second occasion, and all teachers were asked at a staff meeting to complete the survey a second time

Summary

Introduction

Overweight and obesity are a global concern in both developed and developing countries and in school age children, the prevalence continues to remain high. There is a clear need for effective prevention efforts to address the high prevalence of childhood and adult obesity [2] without which obesity will become the primary cause of preventative deaths worldwide [3] Management of this epidemic requires action at a number of levels including broad-based community interventions that focus on environmental change to support individual behaviours [4,5,6]. To effectively target childhood obesity, existing and new programs need to be systematically evaluated to determine the efficacy of the implemented strategies and such evaluations should be of high quality in order to contribute to the evidence for addressing childhood obesity [9] These evaluations are limited by a lack of setting specific tools which allow evaluation specific to a particular setting, such as a school or home environment [10], and further limited by a lack of reliable tools suitable for evaluation purposes in these settings

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