Nutrition self-efficacy assessment: designing and psychometric evaluation in a community-dwelling elderly population

Abstract Background Awareness of nutrition self-efficacy dimensions can enable healthcare providers to guide their use in screening and providing a context for positive changes such as in promoting a healthy lifestyle and quality care among elderly people. Objectives Developing an instrument for assessing nutrition self-efficacy among Iranian elderly population. Methods A sequential mixed exploratory design was applied to clarify and determine dimensions of nutrition self-efficacy in a community-dwelling elderly population in two phases. The first phase included a related literature review and a qualitative study. The validity and reliability of the tool were investigated in the second phase. The instrument’s content validity was assessed by experts in nutrition self-efficacy’s field and reliability was determined by internal consistency and construct reliability. Results Three factors (adherence efficacy, preventive behaviors, and information effectiveness) and 29 items were obtained after assessing the face, content, and construct validity. The reliability of the nutrition self-efficacy questionnaire (NSEQ) exceeded α > 0.7. Concerning the cumulative percent of the variance, the three factors determined 64.05% of the total variance. Conclusions The NSEQ designed in this study, using the background experiences of the elderly living in the community and a review of related texts, and has acceptable reliability and validity. However, the diet self-efficacy questionnaire cannot yet be used as a gold standard, but it can be recommended for use as a measurement of individual diet self-efficacy in a community-dwelling elderly population.