Content and Face Validation of the Lifestyle Medicine Assessment

Introduction: There are no validated global lifestyle medicine brief screening tools that measure health behaviors in all six lifestyle domains. The Lifestyle Medicine Assessment (LMA) tool was initially developed and revised based on feedback elicited from colleagues, experts, and patients. During the developmental process, every item underwent language changes. Three of the original 24 items were removed. However, there have not been any formal validation efforts. This study aims to formally evaluate the face and content validity of the LMA. Methods: A survey was emailed to 12 board-certified lifestyle medicine experts asking them to rank items in the LMA on a 1-4 scale for content relevance and clarity. Content and face validity were quantitatively determined using the item-level content validity index (I-CVI), scale-level content validity index (S-CVI), and item-level face validity index (I-FVI), scale-level face validity index (S-FVI), respectively. Literature accepted thresholds of I-CVI/I-FVI ≥.79 and S-CVI/S-FVI average ≥ .80 were used. Results: Eleven experts returned evaluations of the 21-item LMA. All 21 items had I-CVI for relevance ≥.91 and I-FVI ≥.81 with excellent kappa values. The S-CVI/I-FVI average for relevance and clarity were .99 and .95, respectively. Conclusion: The 21-item LMA is a brief global lifestyle medicine tool that has demonstrated excellent content and face validity.