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Public health
Research
Cross-cultural adaption and validation of the Chinese version of the Child Food Neophobia Scale
  1. JiaoJiao Zou1,
  2. Yan Liu2,
  3. Qiping Yang1,
  4. Hanmei Liu1,
  5. Jing Luo1,
  6. Yufeng Ouyang1,
  7. Joyce Wang3,
  8. Qian Lin1
  1. 1 Department of Nutrition Science and Food Hygiene, Central South University Xiangya School of Public Health, Changsha, China
  2. 2 Department of Child Care, Changsha Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, Changsha, China
  3. 3 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Qian Lin; linqian{at}csu.edu.cn

Abstract

Objective To adapt the Child Food Neophobia Scale (CFNS) cross-culturally for use among 12-36-month-old Chinese toddlers and to perform a preliminary assessment of its construct validity and reliability.

Background Food neophobia is the fear of eating new or unfamiliar foods, which affects the type and quality of individual dietary intake, especially during early childhood. However, measurements of child food neophobia have rarely been reported in China due to a lack of reliable and valid measurements.

Methods The CFNS was translated and adapted into a Chinese version (CFNS-CN) through a forward translation, reconciliation, a back translation, expert review and pretesting. The construct validity and reliability of the CFNS-CN were tested in 390 caregivers of 12–36 months old Chinese toddlers through convenience sampling in Changsha Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, Hunan Province, China. The internal consistency, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and reliability were estimated.

Results The kappa coefficients indicated moderate to perfect agreement between the test and retest, and Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.91. A normal χ2 /df, CMIN/DF=3.302, Comparative Fit Index, CFI=0.993, Tucker-Lewis Index, TLI=0.986 and root mean square error of approximation, RMSEA=0.077 were found. The CFA results showed that the model indicators were acceptable. High food neophobia was observed in 25.1% of individuals.

Conclusion The CFNS-CN showed good internal consistency reliability and construct validity. The CFNS-CN may become an effective tool for assessing food neophobia in Chinese toddlers.

Trial registration This trial was pre-registered at the China Clinical Trial Registration Center under registration number ChiCTR1800015890.

  • food neophobia scale
  • china
  • toddlers
  • reliability
  • construct validity

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026729

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    Footnotes

    • JZ and YL contributed equally.

    • Contributors QL and JZ contributed to the conception and design of this study. QL, JZ and YL drafted the protocol and applied for grant funding for the study. QL revised the protocol and helped to contact the Changsha Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital administrators. JW contributed to the back-translation. JZ, YL, QY, HL, JL and YO participated in the investigations and data collection. JZ was responsible for the data cleaning and analysis, and wrote the first draft and the final article versions of this paper. All the authors interpreted the results and made a substantial contribution to the manuscript’s improvement. All the authors read the final manuscript and approved this submission. No patient advisers were involved.

    • Funding This study was supported by The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Central South University (2018zzts844) and the Central South University Graduate Research Project (2018dcyj064).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval The study followed the principles that were established in the Helsinki Declaration, and it passed the ethical review of the Ethics Committee of the Xiangya School of Public Health at Central South University. The ethical batch number is XYGW-2017-50.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement No data are available.