Development of a tool to assess past food insecurity of immigrant latino mothers.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose is to describe the development and validation of a tool to measure the degree of past food insecurity in an immigrant US population.


METHODS
Focus group discussions and a structured interview. As a first step, focus group discussions were conducted among immigrant Latino mothers. Based on these discussions, an 8-item tool was developed and pilot-tested in a convenience sample of mothers.


METHODS
California.


METHODS
Twenty-two low-income Latino mothers with children, ages 4 to 5 years, in the focus groups and 85 low-income Latino and white mothers of young children in the structured interviews.


METHODS
Constant comparative analysis, Cronbach alpha, Spearman correlations, Chi-square, and Kruskal-Wallis test.


RESULTS
Internal consistency of the remaining 7 items was good (Cronbach alpha = 0.84). Evidence of convergent validity included significant correlations between past food insecurity and maternal education (r = -0.45, p < .0001), crowding in the mother's childhood household (r = +0.30, p < .006), and past food insufficiency (r = +0.74, p < .0001). Foreign-born Latino mothers reported significantly greater levels of past food insecurity than US-born mothers, demonstrating discriminant validity (p < .01).


CONCLUSIONS
This tool may be useful to determine how past deprivation influences current food choices and other nutrition-related behaviors in low-income Latino immigrants.
Kuyper
Edith M
EM
Department of Nutrition, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Espinosa-Hall
Gloria
G
Lamp
Catherine L
CL
Martin
Anna C
AC
Metz
Diane L
DL
Smith
Dorothy
D
Townsend
Marilyn S
MS
Kaiser
Lucia L
LL
D000328:Adult; D002140:California; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004034:Diet Surveys; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D005523:Food Supply / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D007843:Latin America / Q000208:ethnology; D008297:Male; D011203:Poverty