The Adolescent Food Habits Checklist: reliability and validity of a measure of healthy eating behaviour in adolescents.
OBJECTIVE
Amid concerns about the quality of young people's diets, this paper describes the development of a measure of healthy eating behaviour for use with adolescents.


METHODS
Items for the measure were selected from a larger pool on the basis of responses from a pilot study. The 23-item checklist was validated using measures of dietary fat and fibre intake, fruit and vegetable consumption, dietary restraint, nutrition knowledge and a measure of family income.


METHODS
Participants came from seven secondary schools in the north-west of England.


METHODS
A total of 1822 adolescents aged between 13 and 16 y took part in the study, representing 84% of those invited to participate.


RESULTS
Correlations between measures indicate a good level of convergent validity, and the checklist is also shown to have high internal and test-retest reliability.


CONCLUSIONS
The focus on choices available to adolescents means that the checklist will provide a useful addition to food frequency-type approaches to the measurement of adolescent eating behaviour.


BACKGROUND
This research was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council's Health Variations Programme.
Johnson
F
F
ICRF Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, UK.
Wardle
J
J
Griffith
J
J
D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior; D017195:Adolescent Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D004034:Diet Surveys; D004041:Dietary Fats / Q000008:administration & dosage; D004043:Dietary Fiber / Q000008:administration & dosage; D004435:Eating; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005518:Food Preferences; D005638:Fruit; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010865:Pilot Projects; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D014675:Vegetables
D004041:Dietary Fats; D004043:Dietary Fiber