Socioenvironmental influences on children's fruit, juice and vegetable consumption as reported by parents: reliability and validity of measures

OBJECTIVE: To pilot test theory-based questionnaires to measure socioenvironmental influences on children's fruit, juice and vegetable (FJV) consumption as reported by parents. DESIGN: Cross-sectional. SETTING: Parents of fourth to sixth grade students completed socioenvironmental questionnaires. The students completed food records (FRs) for 2 days in the classroom. SUBJECTS: Interviews were completed by 109 parents (17% African-American, 32% Hispanic-American and 51 Euro-American). RESULTS: Student mean daily FJV intake was 2.1 servings. Principal components analyses revealed subscales measuring positive and negative parenting practices; self-efficacy for modelling and planning/encouraging FJV consumption, and making FJV available; encouraging, consequences and discouraging food socialization practices; negative home, cost and canned/frozen food barriers; meal planning; child shopping; mother food preparation; and child lunch and dinner FJV preparation practices. Internal consistencies were adequate to high. Negative parent practices and negative home FJV barriers were significantly negatively correlated with child FJV consumption variables. Planning/encouraging self-efficacy was positively associated with fruit consumption, and child dinner FJV preparation was significantly negatively correlated with child juice consumption. CONCLUSIONS: These questionnaires may provide important insights about the relationship between parent-reported socioenvironmental influences and children's FJV consumption. Future work should test these questionnaires with larger groups of parents and youths, with more reliable estimates of usual FJV intake, e.g. 7-day food records, to obtain a detailed understanding of how parents influence what children eat. Tests of models of relationships among these variables are warranted, but should control for possible confounding variables, e.g. socioeconomic status, gender of the child, etc.