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Feeding Practices Among Portuguese Parents of 5- to 10-Year-Olds: Psychometric Properties of the Comprehensive
Ana Catarina Canário1, Marco Silva-Martins1, Susana Santos1
1Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
Background:
Parents, as primary caregivers, are responsible for most decisions related to children's lifestyle. One of the key elements in children's lifestyle is parents' feeding practices and given the relevance of these practices for children's weight and health-related outcomes, it is important to have valid and reliable measures available to address them in both research and practice. In the current study, we examined the psychometric properties of the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ) in a sample of Portuguese parents of children aged 5-to-10. We evaluated the questionnaire's factor structure, criterion-related validity and test-retest reliability.
Methods:
Primary caregivers (N = 507) of children aged 5-to-10 completed the CFPQ and the Physical Activity Parenting Practices questionnaire, and a subset of the participants (n = 125) completed the CFPQ at a second assessment point, 1 month later.
Results:
The 49-item 12-factor model originally proposed revealed a poor fit to the data. Following empirically and theoretically driven model modifications, we found a good fit to the data in a model comprising 40 items, organized into seven factors (Monitoring, Emotion regulation, Child control, Pressure to eat, Restriction, Healthy family environment and Promote nutrition autonomy). We combined items into new factors depicting food parenting practices that reflect contents for each of the domains of the map of food parenting practices. Criterion-related validity analyses identified that feeding and physical activity parenting practices were positively associated. Internal consistency reliability and test-retest reliability findings suggest that the CFPQ factors were relatively reliable and stable over time.
Conclusion:
Findings suggest that the 40-item version of the CFPQ organized into seven factors is an adequate instrument to evaluate parents' feeding practices among Portuguese parents of children aged 5-to-10.
Key Messages:
Parents' feeding practices are important to evaluate children's health-related outcomes The Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire is a widely used measure The original 12-factor structure was not suitable for parents of children aged 5-to-10 A 7-factor model based on the content map in food parenting practices had the best fit Parents' feeding and physical activity practices seem to be implemented in tandem.
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