Adaptação e validação da family health behavior scale para uso no Brasil

Abstract

Background: It is known that the family environment has been presented as one of the main factors that contribute to childhood obesity. Despite this, there is a scarcity of instruments available to assess family health behaviors, the "Family health behavior scale" can be considered a complete and feasible tool to assess health behaviors of parents and children, meal routines and activity family physics through a questionnaire of only 27 items that is easy to understand. Objetive: To validate the scale "Family health behavior scale" in Portuguese for use in Brazilian children. Methods: The sample included 273 children aged 5 to 12 years. Where those responsible for the child responded to the Family health behavior scale, in addition to the scale, anthropometric measurements of the children's weight and height were performed, as well as the bioimpedance exam in order to assess the percentage of body fat. Children were also assessed for physical activity. For the scale validation process, translation and adaptation were first performed, then the psychometric validation properties (content validity, construct validity and concurrent validity) and reliability (internal consistency, ceiling-floor effect and test-retest). Results: 272 children (54% girls) with a mean age of 7.9 years (SD=2.0) and their caregivers were tested. Exploratory factor analysis showed the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index = 0.79. Children who were considered obese had lower mean total scores than children who had a healthy weight or were overweight. Children who were classified as having a healthy fat percentage had higher scores than children classified as having an excessively high fat percentage. Children who were physically active had significantly higher total scores than children who were physically inactive. Cronbach's alpha was 0.81. Test-retest analyses showed lower agreement and intraclass correlation coefficients than expected 0.63 (95% CI 0.41 to 0.78). Conclusion: Thus, we found that this scale is a useful tool both for clinical practice and for field research of our population with the aim of assisting in the prevention of childhood obesity.