Development of psychosocial scales for evaluating the impact of a culinary nutrition education program on cooking and healthful eating

Abstract

Objective: Develop scales to assess the impact of the Cooking with a Chef program on several psychosocial constructs.

Methods: Cross-sectional design in which parents and caregivers were recruited from child care settings (Head Start, faith-based, public elementary schools), and cooks were recruited from church and school kitchens. Analysis involved descriptive statistics, correlations, and exploratory factor analysis.

Results: Test-retest reliability coefficients ranged from r = 0.63 to r = 0.88. Exploratory factor analysis indicated a simple structure for 3 scales: Cooking Techniques Self-Efficacy, Negative Cooking Attitude, and Self-Efficacy Fruit and Vegetables and accounted for 85.0% of the total variance. Mean responses to each scale were not statistically different between parents and cooks.

Conclusions and implications: Evidence of face validity and construct validity were provided through expert review, factor analysis, and scale correlations. Analyses presented constitute the first step in developing psychosocial scales for evaluating the Cooking with a Chef program and provide preliminary evidence that these scales work well with diverse groups.