A new tool to assess the concept of food quality in children: a validation study

Childhood is the most relevant period for the formation of food preferences. Political institutions, educational agencies and health professionals are quite interested in the evaluation of the actual knowledge of food quality in children because it offers the opportunity to plan educational actions aimed at promoting the health and quality of life of today’s and tomorrow’s citizens. In this paper, we proposed a questionnaire to measure the level of knowledge of the food quality in children. We selected, as the target population, students of lower secondary schools and we adopted a multidimensional approach to the concept of food quality that involved six dimensions. We investigated the internal construct validity and reliability of the scales developed for these six dimensions applying the Rasch model and a differential item functioning analysis. Moreover, we validated the overall scale of the knowledge of food quality through a Second-order Structural Equation Modelling within a Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of our study provide information useful to define and implement educational actions in food quality, in general, or specifically in one or more of food quality dimensions.