Adaptación transcultural de la escala de evaluación de conductas alimentarias en adolescentes: "Adolescent food habits checklist".

Taking into consideration a behavioral approach a scale called the "Adolescent Food Habits Checklist" was developed in England to assess behaviors of adolescents with autonomous eating habits. To develop cross-cultural adaptation from English to Spanish of the "Adolescent Food Habits Checklist" to be applied in Venezuelan adolescents. A translation into Spanish by two independent translators was carried out. The obtained version was retranslated into English and evaluated by the original scale authors. Their recommendations were considered to confirm the content validity of the Spanish version. Last version was applied on 4 pilot tests to get a suitable scale with construct validity and internal consistency reliability. These parameters were reached in the fourth pilot test, which was developed with 200 adolescents between 15 and 19 years of age, of both male and female. An 18-item scale with a Cronbach alpha of 0.863 was obtained. Every item helped to keep a coefficient within 0.849 and 0.864 when they were removed. In addition, all of the items achieved a correlation item -- total higher than 0.3. The analysis of factors showed that most of the items are grouped into three factors that define the construct assessed with a weighing of each factor equal or over 0.4. The cumulative percentage of variance explained for these three factors was 50%. A cross-cultural adaptation of the scale with content validity, construct validity and high internal consistency reliability to be applied in Venezuelan adolescents was obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]