Validity and Reliability of Food Safety Knowledge and Practices Questionnaire among Food Handlers

Majority of food borne disease outbreaks resulted from poor knowledge and malpractice during food preparation. Therefore, there is a need to develop a valid and reliable tool to measure the knowledge and practice towards safe food preparation that contribute to this outbreak. A cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the validity and reliability of the Food Safety Knowledge and Practice questionnaire among food handlers in the primary school canteen operated in Kelantan. Item analysis was conducted to determine the difficulty and discrimination indexes of 40 knowledge items. Construct validity and reliability assessment was done on 30 items that measure four types of food preparation practices; personal hygiene; food hygiene and safety; environmental sanitation; and food storage. Ninetyfour food handlers completed the self-administered questionnaires. Item analysis revealed 6 items was answered correctly by more than 80%, and another 6 items correctly answered by less than 20% respondents. The discrimination index showed 9 items scored below 0.20. Considering the usefulness and practicality of the deleted items, 9 items were re-included resulted in 31 items retained under food safety knowledge section. Exploratory factor analysis of food safety practice section showed three factors with eigen values above 1 accounted for 48.6% of the variance. Nineteen problematic items were removed and remaining 11 items were loaded above 0.40. The internal consistency reliability was good with overall Cronbach's Alpha value was 0.724. This study proposes the Food Safety Knowledge and Practice questionnaire is Nik Rosmawati et al. 2015 Health and the Environment Journal, 2015, Vol 6, No 1 pp 11-30 12 a valid and reliable measure of knowledge and practice among food handlers toward safe food preparation.