Revision of a Parental Self-Efficacy Measure for Promoting Physical Activity and Dietary Behaviors Among Preschoolers From low-Income Families

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Health, Growth, Injury

Abstract

Intro: Recently, Swedish researchers developed, revised, and validated the Parental Self-Efficacy for Promoting Physical Activity and Dietary Behaviors in Children (PSEPAD; Bohman, Ghaderi, & Rasmussen, 2013; Bohman, Rasmussen, & Ghaderi, 2016). The PSEPAD revealed a three-factor structure validated on 2,078 mothers with three-year-old children: (1) promoting healthy dietary behaviors; (2) limit-setting of unhealthy dietary or physical activity behaviors; and (3) promotion of healthy physical activity behaviors. Although the development of the PSEPAD was warranted, the sample used to develop the measure was a homogeneous group of educated, Swedish-born, biological mothers who were relatively healthy in weight and living with a partner. This necessitates an adaptation and validation of the measure on a heterogeneous sample of parents whose children are at greater risk for obesity (Bohman et al., 2013), specifically children in the US from low-SES families.
Method: The original 14-item PSEPAD was expanded to 18-items that only focused on nutrition (physical activity questions were removed) and administered to Head Start parents in the United States. Three subscales were created based on parental self-efficacy for supporting children’s healthy diet. Two subscales were largely the same as the original measure, but a third was created to target the influence of context for self-efficacy for a low-income, American sample: 1) promoting good behavior (“How well do you think you can be a role model for your child about healthy eating and drinking?”); 2) limit setting to reduce unhealthy behaviors (“How confident are you that you can limit visits at fast-food restaurants to 1-2 times per month?”); and 3) maintaining behavior in context that impedes or challenges self-efficacy, (“How confident are you that you can get your child to eat healthy foods and drinks when you are tired, stressed, upset, or busy?”). In addition to the self-efficacy measure, parents completed measures of perceived stress (Cohen et al., 1983), parent feeding style (Hughes et al., 2005), and food quality.
Results: Each subscale demonstrated good reliability: promoting ⍺ = .94; limit setting ⍺ = .81; maintaining behavior in context ⍺ = .91 and showed adequate convergent and predictive validity (see Table 1). Parents who were higher in demandingness reported greater self-efficacy for maintaining their behavior in different contexts, while those who were less responsiveness reported lower self-efficacy in promoting healthy behaviors. Stress and food quality scores were positively correlated with all three subscales of self-efficacy.
Conclusion: Models of health behavior change may be useful for developing programming to help parents improve their children’s health and reduce their risk for obesity. Psychosocial factors, like parental self-efficacy, may be key factor explaining why parents are able to accomplish health behavior change, or may be a direct target for improving children’s health. Our revised version of a measure of parent self-efficacy for nutrition-related decisions demonstrated good reliability, and adequate convergent and predictive validity in a Head Start sample. Although the small sample size was insufficient to conduct a factor analysis, a follow-up study is planned to acquire a larger sample size and examine the underlying factor structure.

Authors

• Dea Zgjani, University of North Florida
  Presenting Author

• Jody S. Nicholson, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer M. Barton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Monique Villamor, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lauri Wright, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author