EPIUnit-Instituto de Saúde Pública, Universidade do Porto, Rua das Taipas, Porto, Portugal.
Departamento de Ciências da Saúde Pública e Forenses e Educação Médica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade do Porto, Alameda Prof. Hernâni Monteiro, Porto, Portugal.
PLoS One. 2020 Jan 23;15(1):e0228099. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228099. eCollection 2020.
The Self-Administered Food Security Survey Module for Children was developed to assess food insecurity of individual children and has not been used in Portugal. We aimed to apply the mixture item response theory model to the Self-Administered Food Security Survey Module for Children, to assess its reliability and validity, and to estimate the cut-offs of the food security status for Portuguese children.
The scale was self-administered to 2132 children of the Generation XXI birth cohort. The internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. We evaluated dimensionality and/or clustering, and Latent Class Analysis, Latent Trait Analysis and Mixture Latent Trait Analysis were tested. The number of classes and/or traits were defined according to the Akaike Information Criterion, Bayesian Information Criterion, Adjusted Bayesian Information Criterion, Vuong-Lo-Mendell-Rubin Likelihood Ratio Test, Bootstrapped Likelihood Ratio Test and Entropy. Construct validity was explored using socio-demographic characteristics. The classification tree was used to define cut-offs to predict cluster membership.
The best model was a Mixture Latent Trait Analysis with 1 factor and 2 classes (food security and food insecurity), assuming class variant item parameters (for items 1 and 3). Based on the estimated posterior probabilities, the food insecurity prevalence was 17.6%. Cronbach's alpha was 0.617. A higher proportion of less-educated mothers and low-income households was observed in the food insecurity class. The classification tree showed an accuracy of 100.0% by identifying the food security and food insecurity groups.
Our results supported that the Self-Administered Food Security Survey Module for Children provides a valid and reliable measure, which allows the identification of food insecurity among Portuguese children.
儿童自我管理的食品安全调查模块是为评估个体儿童的食品安全状况而开发的，尚未在葡萄牙使用。我们旨在应用混合项目反应理论模型对儿童自我管理的食品安全调查模块进行评估，以评估其可靠性和有效性，并估计葡萄牙儿童的食品安全状况的截止值。
该量表由 2132 名 21 世纪出生队列的儿童进行自我管理。采用 Cronbach's alpha 评估内部一致性。我们评估了维度和/或聚类，以及潜在类别分析、潜在特质分析和混合潜在特质分析进行了测试。根据赤池信息量准则、贝叶斯信息量准则、调整贝叶斯信息量准则、武雄-洛-门德尔-鲁宾似然比检验、Bootstrapped 似然比检验和熵来定义类别和/或特质的数量。使用社会人口统计学特征探索结构有效性。分类树用于定义截止值以预测聚类成员资格。
最佳模型是一个具有 1 个因素和 2 个类别的混合潜在特质分析（食品安全和食品安全不足），假设类别变异项目参数（对于项目 1 和 3）。根据估计的后验概率，食品安全不足的患病率为 17.6%。Cronbach's alpha 为 0.617。在食品安全不足的类别中，观察到母亲受教育程度较低和低收入家庭的比例较高。分类树通过识别食品安全和食品安全不足的组，显示出 100.0%的准确性。
我们的结果支持儿童自我管理的食品安全调查模块提供了一种有效且可靠的测量方法，可用于识别葡萄牙儿童的食品安全不足。
