Reliability and validity of a scale to measure consumer attitudes regarding the private food safety certification of restaurants

Validated and reliable instruments for measuring consumer attitudes regarding food quality certifications are lacking, but the measurement of consumer attitude could be an important tool for understanding consumer behavior. Thus the objective of this study was to develop an instrument for measuring consumer attitudes regarding private food safety certifications for commercial restaurants. To this end, the following steps were carried out: development of the interview items; complete pilot testing; item analyses (influence of social desirability and total-item correlation); reliability test (internal consistency and test-retest); and validity assessment (content and discriminative validity and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis). The subjects, all over the age of 18 and drawn from six non-probabilistic samples (n = 7-350) in the city of Campinas, Brazil, were all subjected to an interview. The final scale included 24 items and had a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.79 and a content validation coefficient of 0.99, both within acceptable limits. The confirmatory factor analysis validated a model with five factors and the final instrument discriminated reasonably well between the groups and showed satisfactory reproducibility (r = 0.955). Furthermore, the scale validity and reliability were satisfactory, suggesting it could also be applied to future studies. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.