Cross-cultural adaptation, validation and reliability analysis of child food neophobia scale among Pakistani preschoolers

Background: The evaluation of food neophobia in preschool-aged children is crucial as it helps in understanding their eating habits, ensuring their nutritional adequacy, and promoting healthier food choices from an early age. Objectives: This study aimed to culturally adapt the Child Food Neophobia Scale (CFNS) for Pakistan, determine the prevalence of preschooler's food neophobia and find out its correlation with different demographic characteristics. Methods: The CFNS was translated into Urdu language following the WHO scale translation guidelines. After that, various validity (construct validity, content validity, discriminant validity) and reliability (internal consistency, test-retest consistency, and composite reliability) measures were used to test the translated CFNS. Results: The sample size consisted of 260 mother-child pairs from four kindergartens across three cities. About 64.6 % of the preschoolers were aged 55 to 72 months. Whereas the maternal mean age was 30.1 +/- 5.9 years. The Child Food Neophobia Scale for Pakistan (CFNS-PK) retained all 6 items from the original scale and exhibited satisfactory validity (chi 2/df = 1.28; TLI = 0.99; RMSEA = 0.04; AVE > 0.05 and CVI = 0.80) and reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.80; Kappa > 0.07; CR > 0.7) indicators. Furthermore, the prevalence of preschooler food neophobia was found to be 22.3 %. Whereas preschooler age, gender and maternal education level was correlated with preschooler's food neophobia occurrence. Conclusion: Findings suggest that the 6 item CFNS-PK exhibited high validity and reliability metrics, making it suitable for use in food neophobia assessments among Pakistani children. Furthermore, the high prevalence of food neophobia among Pakistani preschoolers calls for attention.