Development and psychometric validation of a clinical instrument for infant feeding and lifestyle evaluation

There is an absence of a comprehensive clinical instrument to assess and track the development of non-ideal feeding practices and lifestyle behaviours in early childhood. Our primary aim was to develop and validate an assessment instrument, called Feeding, Lifestyle, Activity Goals (FLAGs), designed to serve as a feeding, lifestyle and activity behaviour checklist for children aged 0-2 years.

This study took place between January and May 2023. Experts evaluated content validity using the criteria of relevance, clarity, simplicity and ambiguity, to calculate the item content validity index (I-CVI) and scale CVI (S-CVI) (acceptable cutoff ≥ 0.80). Face validity was assessed by caregivers. Repeated assessments were also performed to determine test-retest reliability based on intra-class correlation (ICC) (acceptable cutoff > 0.75). Construct validity was established through principal component analysis (PCA), and internal consistency was measured using Cronbach's α coefficient (acceptable cutoff ≥ 0.70).

FLAGs consists of 19 items, with a I-CVI of 1.00 in 12 out of 19 items, and S-CVI average of >0.90 for relevance, simplicity and clarity. Among 198 caregivers, 99.0% responded 'agree' and 'strongly agree' in the criteria of clarity and ambiguity; 99.5% in criterion of relevance, and 100% in criterion of simplicity. PCA showed a two-component structure (55.9% variance). Overall Cronbach's α was 0.71. Participants repeated FLAGs assessment on an average of 9 days apart, with ICC of 0.861 (p < 0.001) for the total FLAGs scores.

We have developed an instrument which assesses an infant's feeding and lifestyle behaviour from 0 to 2 years, and this has been assessed to have acceptable validity and reliability.