Development of a nutritional literacy assessment scale for adults and its evaluation of reliability and validity

ObjectiveTo screen the items of the adult nutrition literacy assessment scale, and verify its reliability and validity for providing a tool to assess the nutritional literacy levels of adults.

MethodsThe literature review was used to form the item pool, the initial nutrition literacy questionnaire was developed by Delphi consultation, and the results of online questionnaires of 1 718 adults were collected for further filtering entries combined with critical ration method, correction item-total correlation coefficient method and factor analysis method.The reliability of scale was tested using the Cronbach's α coefficient and Split-Half coefficient, and the validity of scale was tested in terms of content validity and structure validity.

ResultsThe nutritional literacy assessment scale included the functional nutrition literacy(including knowledge, understanding, obtaining skills and applying skills), interactive nutrition literacy(interactive skills) and critical nutrition literacy(critical skills), a total of 43 items.The Cronbach's α coefficient and Split-half reliability coefficient of total scale were 0.971 and 0.855, respectively.The content validity index at scale level and item level were 0.982 and 0.846-1.000, respectively.The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the standardized factor load, AVE value and CR value of the six dimensions were 0.463-0.938, 0.552-0.807 and 0.860-0.961, respectively.

ConclusionsThe reliability and validity of the nutrition literacy assessment scale are good, and it can be used to assess the nutritional literacy for adults.