Development and preliminary validation of the Adolescent Food Parenting Questionnaire: Parent and adolescent version

Abstract

Suitable instruments for measuring Food Parenting Practices (FPP) among adolescents and their parents that also measure the perception of adolescents about their parent s FPP are rare. The current study describes the development and preliminary testing of a short 16-item Adolescent Food Parenting Questionnaire (AFPQ) for parents (AFPQ-p) and adolescents (AFPQ-a) that may enable future large-scale research on potentially eminent parent-child FPP discrepancy. Participants included 381 parents (73.8\u202f% mothers; Mage 45.9, 26.2% fathers; Mage 49.1) and their adolescent children (aged 12-16) who participated in the Dutch G(F)OOD together study. Most parents finished higher professional education (mothers: 44.3\u202f%; fathers: 34.4\u202f%) and performed a paid job of 32 hours per week or more (mothers: 22.1\u202f%; fathers: 60.0\u202f%). The theoretical framework of Vaughn (2016) was leading in the development of the AFPQ. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed on a random split sample of parent-adolescent dyads and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed on the other half. The EFA in both parent and adolescent samples resulted in a clear 5 factor solution explaining 61.6\u202f% (AFPQ-p) and 64.2\u202f% (AFPQ-a) of the variance respectively, representing the factors Autonomy Support (α\u202f=\u202f0.79/.82), Coercive Control (α\u202f=\u202f0.85/.83), Snack Structure (α\u202f=\u202f0.79/75), Healthy Structure (α\u202f=\u202f0.78/74) and Modelling (α\u202f=\u202f0.69/85). CFA confirmed good model fit for the AFPQ-p and the AFPQ-a. Associations with adolescent self-reported food intake were in the expected direction, confirming the preliminary convergent validity of the instrument among a moderate to highly educated group of parent-adolescent dyads. Although the AFPQ provides a promising short instrument, future research in more diverse samples is needed to build evidence on the instrument s psychometric characteristics in other groups.