Development, internal reliability and preliminary construct validity of the Dutch Dietary Intention Evaluation Tool for In-patients (DIETI)

Background and aims: Diet is important in prevention and management of non-communicable disease and in particular, cardiovascular disease. Recently, more hospitals gear to-wards healthier dietary policies, however, a tool to assess the effect of these interventions in pa -tient populations is currently lacking. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is generally used to assess health-related behavior and offers a framework for development of questionnaires. In this study, we aim to evaluate the reliability, internal consistency and preliminary construct validity of the newly developed Dietary Intention Evaluation Tool for In-hospital patients (DIETI) which is based on the TPB.Methods and results: An expert panel constructed the item list of the DIETI. A total of 312 patients admitted to the cardiology ward filled out the DIETI. Explanatory-and confirmatory factor anal-ysis showed that our tool adequately discerns five TPB-consistent factors regarding a healthy diet in hospitalized patients. (N = 312, for the CFA model c2 = 313.072 (df = 160, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.939, RMSEA = 0.058). Subsequent analysis of reliability showed satisfactory to strong internal consistency of the questionnaire as a whole and all subscales (Cronbach's alpha for the subscales ranging between 0.65 and 0.88).Conclusions: We conclude that the DIETI is an internally reliable tool to assess behavioral inten-tions regarding a healthy diet of in-hospital patients. Thus, this questionnaire can be used to evaluate the effect of dietary interventions aimed at hospitalized patients.& COPY; 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Italian Diabetes Society, the Ital-ian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Italian Society of Human Nutrition and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).