Development and preliminary evaluation of Chinese School-aged Children’s Eating Behavior Scale

Background The objective of this study was to develop a scale to assess eating behaviors of school-aged children (6–12 years old) in China. Methods To develop the scale, a literature review and qualitative interviews were conducted. The draft scale contained 115 items and went through three evaluations among three groups of caregivers ( n = 140, 400, 700) selected from suburban and urban kindergartens in Xi’an, Hanzhong, and Yanan, China, from March 2017 to October 2018. The psychometric properties of the scale were assessed using exploratory, confirmatory factor analysis, and variability analysis. Results The final scale consisted of 46 items across eight dimensions including food fussiness, satiety responsiveness, food responsiveness, bad eating habits, susceptible diet, restrained eating, enjoyment of food, and junk food addiction. The total cumulative variance contribution rate was 52.16%. The scale and dimensions' Cronbach’s α coefficients, Guttman split-half reliability, and test- retest reliability were all above 0.65. The fitting indices for the confirmatory factor analysis were all close to 1. The scores for education of caregiver, family structure, and the body mass index of children were different among dimensions and groups, thus suggesting good discriminative utility. Conclusions All of the results indicated that the scale has good reliability and construct validity for evaluating the eating behaviors of school-aged children in China.