Validity and Reliability of the Facility List Coder, a New Tool to Evaluate Community Food Environments

A community food environment plays an essential role in explaining the healthy lifestyle patterns of its community members. However, there is a lack of compelling quantitative approaches to evaluate these environments. This study introduces and validates a new tool named the facility list coder (FLC), whose purpose is to assess food environments based on data sources and classification algorithms. Using the case of Mataró (Spain), we randomly selected 301 grids areas (100 m²), in which we conducted street audits in order to physically identify all the facilities by name, address, and type. Then, audit-identified facilities were matched with those automatically-identified and were classified using the FLC to determine its quality. Our results suggest that automatically-identified and audit-identified food environments have a high level of agreement. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) estimates and their respective 95% confidence intervals for the overall sample yield the result "excellent" (ICC ≥ 0.9) for the level of reliability of the FLC.