The Adolescent Food Habits Checklist: reliability and validity of a measure of healthy eating behaviour in adolescents

Abstract

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. 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. Participants came from seven secondary schools in the north-west of England. A total of 1822 adolescents aged between 13 and 16 y took part in the study, representing 84% of those invited to participate. Correlations between measures indicate a good level of convergent validity, and the checklist is also shown to have high internal and test-retest reliability. 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. This research was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council's Health Variations Programme.