The Child-care Food and Activity Practices Questionnaire (CFAPQ): development and first validation steps

Objective: To develop and validate a questionnaire to measure food-related and activity-related practices of child-care staff, based on existing, validated parenting practices questionnaires. Design: A selection of items from the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ) and the Preschooler Physical Activity Parenting Practices (PPAPP) questionnaire was made to include items most suitable for the child-care setting. The converted questionnaire was pre-tested among child-care staff during cognitive interviews and pilot-tested among a larger sample of child-care staff. Factor analyses with Varimax rotation and internal consistencies were used to examine the scales. Spearman correlations, t tests and ANOVA were used to examine associations between the scales and staff's background characteristics (e.g. years of experience, gender). Setting: Child-care centres in the Netherlands. Subjects: The qualitative pre-test included ten child-care staff members. The quantitative pilot test included 178 child-care staff members. Results: The new questionnaire, the Child-care Food and Activity Practices Questionnaire (CFAPQ), consists of sixty-three items (forty food-related and twenty-three activity-related items), divided over twelve scales (seven food-related and five activity-related scales). The CFAPQ scales are to a large extent similar to the original CFPQ and PPAPP scales. The CFAPQ scales show sufficient internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha ranging between 0.53 and 0.96, and average corrected item-total correlations within acceptable ranges (0.30-0.89). Several of the scales were significantly associated with child-care staff's background characteristics. Conclusions: Scale psychometrics of the CFAPQ indicate it is a valid questionnaire that assesses child-care staff's practices related to both food and activities.